japan

For F.

Sometimes your poems sound more like notes
for poems than actual poems to me. But wait,
I mean that nicely. They are notes that militate for the unfinished,
and the dishevelment of scattered lines,
so alive, affect me (paradoxically) in a way
that finished poems, brought home to the station,
for some reason often don’t. Your scattered
lines from a scattered life are delivered with scatted emotion.
You appear and sing and no one knows what the hell
it was we just heard or read, except real
and alive and hey, thanks for the trip to Jupiter, pal.
This reminds me of the Japanese ghost story
of a tunnel with ghosts inside which a young couple
drives through one night. They hear this terrible thudding
against the windshield and their windows, but see nothing
but their headlights. When they get to a gas station,
they notice these ghostly handprints, all sizes, on every window,
as if many somethings tried frantically to get in.
They ask the gas station attendant there to wipe the windows
with a squeegee and he tries, but tells them he can’t.
All the prints are on the inside of the car. I think
that’s the best explanation for how your poems
and their ghosts work on me. I think I’m hearing
those desperate sounds from the outside, but realize
shortly afterwards your hungry ghosts have made it
all the way in.