The Ghosts

Despite their official status

ghosts do not retire

or sign up for Medicare

they are alive and well.

The bigger than life ones 

live with vivacity 

in the cemeteries of novels

and the tombs of movie palaces

where at this very moment 

Jean Harlow is slinking like a panther in

a dangerous negligee

and Jimmy Stewart is stammering his way 

into the heart

of a woman who has

pulverized his bashful vocabulary.

The city ones

still ride trolley cars

drive horse-drawn lunch wagons

dunk sinkers in a cup of Automat joe

sell the Herald Tribune for a nickel on 

street corners

sip in speakeasies 

And row barefoot in Central Park 

twirling parasols 

while soliloquies 

are being offered

by The Barrymores

beneath the watchful eye of chandeliers. 

The ones who are closest to me,

my once-upon-a-time 

conga line of relatives

who used to sashay from cars

on a Saturday night

swinging pink cake boxes from Ebinger’s 

like church incense

who were picked off one by one

by unfiltered cigarettes

and the strangulation of regret

And the friends

who shared

warm beach blankets

and secrets

as we traced the landscape of shells

and listened to radios

and the heart murmur rumble of the ocean

And the girls

who became women 

in the velvet soft darkness of 

suburban bedrooms

until parents

suddenly appeared

like the enemy in

driveways

are all still here

preserved like roses

dozing between the covers

of a well traveled book.

As for the ghosts

who populate the civilization of my nightmares

well, we’re in group therapy now

trying to work it out

even though we both know

and probably don’t want to admit

that it’s over

And we’re just holding on.