No. 87
Being a good ghost
The angle of the early winter sun enters the house more penetratively, marks the walls, is more because there is less of it. The confusing beauty of Astral Weeks plays on the turntable. The light and the music are waiting, with us, for winter, for the time warp of the holidays, for the real, rough cold to come. This mild November week feels unreal in the face of December, of January, of February. We know what is coming.
Soon milking will be done for the season, the goats will rest and gestate in the barn under the scent of a summer’s worth of hay in the loft above. Candles are lit in suppertime darkness. The feeling of living on a farm is the warmest and fullest now in this time between seasons. Onions strung, hanging from nails on basement joists; potatoes sleeping in boxes, coated in the dirt they grew in; apple sauce waiting sweetly in jars on the old pine shelves set on fieldstones in the cellar all feel like spirits inhabiting our home, alive in a way that gives us more life.
One of my favorite feelings is the sensation of sharing space with the ghosts of a house. How many and who slept, suspended a mattress thickness, where I sleep now? Who smoked at the window? Who sat in the corner where the upright piano is, leveled on a bench, playing music, and how often? What songs? Who sang to their children, cried in the bath, ate from the garden just outside the door? The haunting is thick, the air is saturated in every moment of every ghost of the past. The only thing we don’t share is time—every other intimacy, every other human action, is overlapped.
I can devote myself to this: being a full and proper ghost for the future. Someone looked out this south-facing window and wondered what poetry could come out of him; tried hard with love and confusion to grow and enjoy food; walked with a stainless steel bucket each morning from the kitchen door to the barn to milk and rest his head on the soft sides of warm-uddered does; held crying children; cried himself, many times; set up games of chess; wrote to friends; stoked the fire. With all my love of life, I will haunt these spaces, and if ever anyone wonders while standing here if someone once kissed or read or sang or bawled, their wonder will last only as long as the speed of that love.
POEM
A huge flock of blackbirds, bigger than you would imagine, swelling up suddenly from the trees while jogging through the woods
Their animal community, their animal lives
giving me permission to be an animal and stop
to watch to feel the freedom of purposeless time.
Meaningless, life.
In the overwhelming ravishment of birds
the useless, thought-ending knowledge
dissipates. So what if it is true.
So what.
They fly and fly and fly and fly.Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight
Gerry Mulligan • Paul Desmond Quartet, the 1957 record two of the coolest cats of modern jazz made in a 2am recording session in Los Angeles. Like Desmond says of Mulligan, “he just does all the right things.”
More coffee than usual. The end of Daylight Savings Time hit hard this year. I’m still sloughing it off two weeks later.
Pottery from various fall sales in the valley. Notably, a pitcher from Peter Jadoonath.
New stainless steel burners for the propane furnace. Turns out you’re supposed to check those for corrosion more than once a decade.
A good New England-style breakfast of scrapple and eggs courtesy of Neal.
Cheers,
Jakey boy