SOPHIE

Somewhere -- -a bar? A lecture? -- my muse met

George's daughter, the blind Princess Sophie,

Who spent many of her last dark years
Tearing up books under the impression that torn paper
Comforted the sick. Who knows how many pillows
She sent to puzzled ill people? It was a slow season;
I had no work for her. Still, she seemed a quiet soul
And blind! And princess! So I let her live
In an imaginary garret room. Unfortunately, zoning laws
Required I construct a bath house next door
(If you have bath house ghosts, sooner or later
There must be a bath house for them to haunt)
The garret bored her; she frequented the bath house
Where she mastered Minnesota Whist. I don't see
How a blind woman can win so often, nor what
She means to do with her indentured ghosts.

HUMMUM

There are always ghosts in a bath house
They flirt in the shadows, complain
That the moon no longer loves them,
Drink tea they brew from dead leaves
And slantwise words. That one there --
So old it remembers my father as he was
Before he was born -- is no longer certain
Whether it was a cat before or after
Its great success on the vaudeville stage.

INCIDENT

Almost featureless, the ghost
Stands by a wall. The rain

Makes people hurry by.
I furtively put in his hand
The memory of a dime
One of the old ones, silver,
With Mercury's head on it
He curls his fingers around it,
Nods and is gone.

DESIGN

When I submitted the latest design
For my ghost I included a note
That many things were negotiable
I am willing to be real or imaginary
Or some combination of the two.
Palpable? Impalpable? No great matter.
I am willing to wear full armor
And walk battlements armed cap a pie.
On the other hand, I can manage
As a trick of light or a pale shadow.
There is just one thing: I must have pockets
Or where will I put stones and bits of metal?
Where, when I visit my parents' grave,
Will my left hand go while my right
Swoops and points, unfolds and clenches?

SETTING DREAMS

In his rare idle moments Svevo,

Assistant to the God of Penn Station,

Has been setting the god’s dreams

To music. (The God of Penn Station

Never sleeps; Svevo dreams for him).

The ghosts who have been waiting

For the 7:43 B & O Express to Chicago

Since October 1, 1926 have begun

To sing some of the catchier tunes.

This unnerves the more sensitive

Nowaday trainmen and commuters.

NEW IMMUNITY

"The trouble with your old immune system," she said,
Is that it never asserted itself, never asked
For money or demanded a name. I intend
To make different, gaudier mistakes.
I suppose I'll defend you from diseases --
It's in the contract -- but also from imposts, provosts
Pot roasts, lamp posts, most ghosts and crab grass
My name will be Furiosa Pendragon and I
Will accompany you, wearing a sword
And blowing a small trumpet. Invisibility
Is not my aim. I will take it kindly
If your dress from now on does not clash
With maroon and gold, which are my colors."

Zvei Max

Ways to tell my grandfather Max from Max the Emperor:

My grandfather is the one who was never

Duke of Carinthia nor of Brabant, Lorraine, Styria,

Limburg, Carniola, Luxembourg, or Gelderland.

He wasn’t the Landgrave of Alsace either

Nor, no matter how much you pleaded, could he

Have made you a margravine, a herzog or even a graf

On the other hand, if you wanted a warm coat

Applying to the Emperor would have been useless;

The man couldn’t even thread a needle!

Further:

The Emperor is the one whose mother

Did not give him a tallis bag when he was thirteen;

My grandfather, in return,never gave Henry VIII

A helmet with rams horns and spectacles;

I suppose this makes them even.

As to ghosts, the Emperor saw more than a few

My grandfather, I believe, only knew one. Maybe two.

CONCERT

If things were still as they were

A hard road would lead to hearing

Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 1,

With Vladimir Horowitz, Arturo Toscanini,

And the New York Philharmonic of 1942.

First, you’d have to collect a pinch of grave dust

For each musician, as well as the stagehands

(Union rules forbid resurrecting the orchestra

Without the stagehands). A flautist

And a French horn player are still alive;

You would have to send them tickets

And make them young again. Then,

Having conjured up the dead (Hint:

Call up Toscanini first) and restored the living

You’d book the Platonic Ideal of concert halls

(Good luck finding an open date!),

Allow for rehearsals, allow for Horowitz

Quitting in a fury no fewer than three times,

But probably no more than seven,

Tell the Tsar that if he wants to come

He must buy a ticket like anyone else.

Well worth it, of course, but not at all easy.

As it is, I put on my earphones and the ghosts

(How kind they have become in death!)

Play it for me, and then the Emperor Concerto.

BRUGES

When they brought the good news from Aix to Ghent
We Ghent folks shook our heads. "This news is too good;
There is no market for it here. Carry it to Bruges
Which is so ghost-ridden one must push them aside
Simply to order some cheese, some beer, some bread;
The dead are always looking for good news and will pay
In sound currency. Do not, though, bite their gold coins
To test their soundness; they may bite back.”

SHADOWING

Some say I resemble you and I do
But as a shadow, casually cast.
You were born at the moment
Sharp eyes became uncertain
If a thread was blue or green
So I see things invisible to see.
It disconcerts me to find that,
Long years before I was born,
You walked lands I thought mine
By grace and right of first discovery.
I have had to haul down my flags
And tell the kings that lands I claimed
In their names were never theirs at all.
Reflecting sometimes that we both
Have always been fond of shadows
(Also ghosts, dreams, frogs,
Mirrors, snapdragons and parables)
I am almost, for a while, content.

MIGRATING

When the barefoot friars left the Temple of Jupiter
They took the ghost of Edward Gibbon with them
Though a mocker and an infidel he had, in most ways,
Been a courteous and at times beloved cohabitant
Helping the young postulants with their Latin,
Conversing with the eldest friars when, sleepless,
They were ashamed to speak convent gossip to God.
Death improved him and he became less petulant
If less urbane. His little round mouth relaxed
And, violating the strictures of his youth,
He sometimes, not unkindly, laughed aloud.
Christmas Eves he would tactfully absent himself
Going to the barn to listen to such of the cows
As chose to the use their midnight license,
Conversing with him in a human language.

PRELIMINARY FINDINGS

According to the records, George III's ghost
Was first spotted marching with suffragettes
In early 1904. Standing outside Buckingham Palace
He inaudibly chanted "Votes for women now!"
And unsuccessfully tried to chain himself to the railings.
After that, he became almost a fixture at the protests
Usually appearing in full court dress and powdered wig
But sometimes as an old disheveled man, almost blind,
With a ragged beard and wearing a nightshirt
In a long-surpressed portion of her memoirs
Christabel Pankhurst wrote that she and her friend,
The medium Isopel Graham-Berners, conjured him up
At an otherwise uneventful Mayfair Terrace seance
And he resisted all Graham-Berner’s efforts to dispell him.
"Too," she wrote, "he looked so sad with his blue goggly eyes
That we would have felt it cruel to call in the exorcists.
He and my mother sat for hours in the kitchen
While she read suffragist pamphlets to him
To this day, I'm not sure if he believed in the cause
Or just wanted, for once, to be on the rebels' side;
But perhaps I do him an injustice." Whitehall still rebuffs
Requests for its files on the king's posthumous career.

AMONG THE AUTOMATA

In his swift copperplate hand the boy
Wrote "Do I have a soul?" Despite the sign
Saying "NO MORE THAN FIVE TURNS"
Some late visitor had wound his key
Six and a half times. The rabbi shrugged.
"I don't know. What does one look like?
I'm a ghost, not a magician." The magician,
Who seldom spoke, lifted painted eyebrows
To indicate he didn't know either.
"You had one last Thursday," said the windup girl
"It whistled at me, like a kettle, and winked."

GHOSTS

Every empty theater's ghosts believe that they
Were once the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
On a ruined stage at midnight try whispering
"Hoi! Burbage; art deaf? -- that was your cue!"
Some burly shade is sure to conjure himself up
Out of rust and cobwebs,out of echoes,
The memory of a prop sword at his hip.

TRUMPETER

On his last voyage Columbus

Took a trumpet player along

Perhaps to play for the Emperor

If China was finally found

Where it should have been

If Mexico wasn’t there instead.

When I read of this I thought

Musicians and ghosts both wander

And surely the trumpeter

Made his way to the Emperor

Though after many trials

Taking gigs along the way

Following jazz up the Mississippi

Along the St. Lawrence, then getting lost

And following it back down

Finding at last the hidden passage

By which the waters of the Amazon

Mingle with the Yang Tse.

All this I meant to write about

But my father’s friend, Zhu Youijan

The last Ming Emperor, was not

Feeling musical. The trumpeter

Stood on the shore watching

The poem pull away without him.

A BIT OF THE BACK STORY

Some time ago, four automatons kept house together in London. The mechanical girl played the harpsichord; the mechanical boy wrote in perfect copperplate; the mechanical bird hopped up and down and whistled. The mechanical wizard held a wand and a book and, if you put a coin in his hand, he would close his eyes and nod back his head and point his wand at a list of answers. He felt fortune telling was beneath him, but there was rent to pay.
A discontented magician, even one who runs by clockwork, is a chancy thing. There was little magic in London in those days, but somehow he had a share of the little there was. He had a queer relation with the automaton maker Henri Maillardet and always insisted that he had assisted in his own creation. For several years after Maillardet’s death, the magician moped and the fortunes he gave became more and more gloomy. Lovers were told they would forget one another; expectant heirs that their rich and ailing uncles would find unsuspected reservoirs of strength.

Having heard the same songs everyday for many years he one day idly pointed his wand at the girl and grated “Can you not play something else?” She could; no one had ever asked her.  The mechanical boy apprenticed himself to the magician and the two of them – after many failed attempts, one of whom almost became Prime Minister and two of whom had to be hunted down by the men from Bow Street, finally conjured up the ghost of old Maillardet. At night, very late, the boy the magician and the ghost would slip outside and, standing well away from the lamplight, smoke narrow cigars. No matter how windy the night, the smoke would gather around their heads and then slowly drift towards the ground.

THIS. THAT TOO.

Only old ninjas throw their interbangs

After which they walk stiffly

And retire within parentheses.

Their hearts are folded steel but

Their semi-colons give out at last

Putting a period to their time on earth

And they walk amidst the asterisks.

The ghosts of my  parents came by last night

To assure me there was no life after death

Only surcease., absence, ending;

“Then why are you here and, for that matter,

How?”

          “You think long-held habits can be broken

As easily as that? You called and we came.”

Try to remember

That each day you are growing

More absent-minded

DISPATCH FROM THE DARK CITY

        There was a time when I grew uncomfortable in the constant presence of the ghosts who were living, so to speak, with me, though they were soft-spoken and well-mannered. Perhaps that was part of what bothered me – they had far better manners than I did, and any competent exorcist entering my apartment would confidently have lit upon me as the unquiet spirit in need of expulsion. I began taking long walks and then longer walks. The cats who are possibly the original builders of the dark city grew fond of me, and would occasionally give me small gifts – a few marbles, half a surprised mouse, a streaked stone which muttered to itself. I carried the stone with me for a few days but stopped because the coins in my pocket were picking up bad habits from it.

        This was a good while ago; my ghosts and I eventually worked out our problems and they were taken over by one of my younger sisters, Greta. (It is no good asking how many sisters I have; they are like the columns at Stonehenge; it brings ill-luck to try to count them and you’ll never get the same number twice). I saw them when I visited her, but rarely thought of them otherwise. They seemed content, in their bloodless and well-bred way.

A DREARY POEM

The day is rainy and chill and drear

Blood runs thick; the heart misgives

The hour’s gods do not hold dear

What moves and breathes or thinks it lives.

Compass needles will not point true

Or north has drifted from its post

And wanders now, just as you do.

A shadow stirs – a mouse? a ghost?

No matter; all within this place are lost

Nor star nor dream to light the way

No anodyne for soul that’s sick

Rainy and chill and drear the day

The heart misgives; the blood runs thick.

TUESDAY'S POEMS

One morning, having forgotten she died,

She rented rooms from a tailor, hired a maid,

Set flowers in the window.

When the tailor put the cat out at night

It would sneak back in the house

To visit with her.

Before going to bed she would kneel

Politely asking Christ to watch over her sleep.

But He rarely did.

Instead an old Roman god, left behind,

Paced the confines of her room

Until the false dawn.

When I was nine, the maid’s ghost

Told me in a dream the name

To which the cat would answer.

When you have just eight readers it is no light thing

To lose two of them. “Send no more poems

Like the ones you’ve been writing. It has become

Too burdensome even to ignore them.”

Oh, but I will miss my audience! Still,

Ich kenn nicht anders; my muse is not

Anyone with whom I would trifle. Demons,

She says, and angels and the maid’s ghost

Come from the grave to whisper

The name of a cat she once knew

When she worked for an old dead woman.