Solitude

And what would I say to you, Barbara, if one ghost could talk to another—if dust could speak to smoke? I’d wish that we could slip back, as on a trail of light from an early star, and begin our story again. I’d say that I’m sorry for all those years that I slouched in bars in New Orleans and imagined finding my father, imagined gliding back in time to search his fugitive haunts on the bleary skids of Washington Avenue, or in the strip joints of lower Hennepin in the old Minneapolis of my childhood.

Perhaps it is late on a windy afternoon in November, 1947. Scraps tumble along the streets, mirroring the swift, high clouds. The bums worry about winter, gathering in doorways to talk of freight trains and journeys, their dusty, underground language punctuated by the squeak of corks in bottles, their arms moving for warmth like damaged wings.

I sit with my father in an old wooden booth by a window that frames a neon sign. The booth is a mausoleum, its memoried surfaces emblazoned with cigarette burns and etched everywhere with names and dates that ripple beneath the hand—the lonely beauty of time’s going in derelict places, of disparate lives conspiring to carve a text. Outside, the sky grows dark as any sea. Perhaps the clouds part from time to time to reveal the ancient starlight, the worlds beyond worlds and the layers of time beyond need.

In the orange glow of the neon, we listen to Billy Eckstine on the juke singing “In My Solitude.” I am home. I buy my father a beer and crack the cellophane on a pack of Luckies. We talk, slowly releasing the past from its silence. I ask him if the drinking life began for him, as it did for me, with the thrill of sex lacing the smoke of jazz clubs and pool halls. Or maybe for him it started with terror, in the carnage of the war—his war—now so long over. Contemplative behind his Lucky, matching his words to the current of longing that all drinkers ride, he tells his story. As the neon flickers, we drink, taken by absence and desire, our bodies at rest in the void, our lives turning away like motes drifting in a shaft of light. We carve our names.

But we cannot speak, since death is the end of voice. And yet he haunts me, Barbara, as you do, with memories that will not die.

A versification of “Solitude” appears in Chance of a Ghost: An Anthology of Ghost Poems (Helicon Nine Editions, ’05), edited by Gloria Vando and Philip Miller.