The Haunting
Across my ages is a house
Where dusty corners do not exist.
There is no gray, unpainted wood
On the outside to announce
Its purposeful being.
Creaky floor boards do not exist
To let this occupant signal
Where it walks in darkness
Or hides in a closet of shreds.
The only wind that sings
Its mournful song is on my face
As I walk from room to room
Or sit upon my porch
As an outside breeze
Heats or cools the living skin
Upon my face and arms
This ghost is invisible
As all ghosts really are,
Locked in a cloud of memory,
Clicking like an oil heater
On the first cold night of use.
I hear him in the dark
Even when the sun flashes
On a summer day, sending me
Inside to avoid its painful sting.
It is a phantom in my mind
That returns as surely
As any memory of psychic play
He's in the hospital where my friend
Lays in his last days on my visit
I'm about to enter the bright room
Next to this ghost’s darkened rest
The black entrance to his room
Next door into which
I could not see.
It's my memory of a hospital ward
As i pass the white dream
Of a nurses’ station
On my way for a visit
When suddenly the peace
Of it all shatters every corner
Of my own dark room
Hundreds of miles and years
In a past that once again
A voice cries out
A voice of someone I never met
That rattles my own bones
To shake my own chains
In sympathy with every horror
A man near the end of his life
As he is headed alone
His banshee like cry in one word
“Mother!”
I press a nurse to explain:
His parents won't come.
He dies of complications
Of a disease he acquired
In the great pleasure of life and love.
He dies of the same disease
That will release my own friend.
This ghost haunts my memory
As surely as any that might
Walk through an old dark house.
Through every thought of those times
Comes that voice as loud
As any pan I drop upon a floor.
Its silence now only rings
As I lay upon my back
Alone in my night
Hearing the first drops of rain
On a stormy night,
As cold as any grave.
Barry G. Wick
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