Two Hauntings, and: Dead Poet in the Passenger Seat

Abstract

Two Hauntings, and: Dead Poet in the Passenger Seat Lesley Wheeler (bio) Two Hauntings It's mostly slag, the geologist says. He squintsat each chunk of my dead grandmother's rockcollection, then up at me to see if my feelingsare hurt. Glass, leftover. He tries the amberlump with his pocketknife, to see it break,I guess. Some copper ore, too, and basalt.Could be from anywhere. Her motives unclear. Somebody's with you now. The medium pointsat my sister, on a ghost tour with a packof college friends. She had just started thinkingof our other grandmother. The memories made her somber:a family row, some pills not swallowed, a stroke.She wants you to know that it was an accident.She misses you all. My sister phones me in tears. I miss her too, but I knew her grief. What hurtsis the story lost in the rubble. That vitreous trace. [End Page 74] Dead Poet in the Passenger Seat Dickinson flickers beside me,a sepia projectionin too few frames per second—an analog broadcast, broken as trees break light. Discrete, despitethe slant-rhyme of us. She's dazedby the persistence of her signal,but grows sharp as she plays with the radio knobs. She asks how I dreamand conjure while I drivethis carriage at such shuddering speed.Observes that I'm not alive to the blurred show at the roadside—plungeof hawk for carrion,stems staggering under seed. She warns,slow down. I carry on about parallel routes, the mapI might have used. Her imagegoes snowy, faintly doubled. I askif she regrets her fine-stitched silences. Thinking of words, she slantsforward, as if against wind,and wrings her hands. She says, oh, yes,I do. Too many friends were ghosts, or I a ghost to them.But glancing at her eyesjust for one attentive moment,I glimpse the no, joyous, [End Page 75] the banked-up fire of her bound-up hair.Her dash protracts—each inky linesizzles like a telephone wire.Connected the old way. Alone. [End Page 76] Lesley Wheeler Lesley Wheeler's newest collection, Heterotopia, won the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. Her previous books include Heathen (C&R) and Voicing American Poetry (Cornell); her poems appear in Poetry, Blackbird, Slate, and other journals. Copyright © 2011 University of Nebraska Press