i. The company

Half-concealed in flurries twisted by
wind,
the ghosts of my dead drift above the
river.
I’m tired from the midnight flight and
turn,
impatient, from hallucination.

But there they are, wind passing through
them—
mother, grandmother, the friend who
killed
himself at twenty-one. I press my ear to
the glass
to hear what they are saying.

They do not want to return to their lives
do not beckon me to join them. All their
yearning
is to live once more on my breath.
Like a dutiful child I become

the warm tongue speaking their names.
They sweep forward like dancers taking a
bow.
The train slows into a station. In death as
in life
the boy I cannot name turns away.

ii. Impact

I try coaxing my mother into the train.
No matter how sweetly I speak, she will
not
free herself from the company of ghosts.

I promise not to hold her; I want only to
know
is she happy. I offer reminiscence, news
of those
she left behind, children, grandchildren,

a few devoted friends. Nothing suffices.
Grief and the jogging of the train rock
me
to a kind of sleep where I dream she is

languorous as silk, gliding through
columns of light to a room without walls where the poet is singing her life.

It’s all there, every beating, every kiss, the
hours
at the barre, the yards of tulle her
mother’s needle
gathered at her waist, summers in the
mountains

she rode bareback like a boy. What
scraped the keloid
onto her back makes her go still, shakes
me.
awake, alone on a train rocketing north.

iii. A living ghost

My father lives in Fremont, California
with his second wife and a swimming
pool. Rain
or shine he shoots nine holes of golf every
morning, drives
home and drinks gin until he passes out.

I keep trying to forget the last time we
met,
the Christmas morning he snuck up
behind me to slide
his palms around my hips, buzz the nape
of my neck.

My sister says he does it to all the pretty
girls,
it’s my job to love him no matter what.
So many lies:
the innocence of his touch, my not
minding. Everything
I can say about him sounds so trite: he
never listened
he used to pinch me when no one was
looking.

It’s years since I’ve returned his calls.
Last summer
at my nephew’s birthday party, he and I
mingled
on opposite ends of the lawn. His
sidelong glances
gauged my capacity for surrender. So I
thought.
It turned out he was trying to place me.

Where, he asked my sister, have I seen
that woman before?

She says he cried when she told him. I say
the gin cried.

Yes, I’m hard as iron.

iv. Confession

I knew my friend was planning to inject
ether into a vein. Certain death.
Once the cold liquid entered his blood,
nothing
could stop his heart from stopping, not
if the ambulance waited outside, not
if a crash team stood by.
Looking back
I understand it was his heart he could
not live with
the way it leapt in the presence of men
and danced in his chest and would not be
still.

His mother found the corpse. Needle in
arm.
No note. Foregone verdict: Accidental
overdose.

After the mass I told one friend
what I knew. He scoffed. Everyone knows
that boy
loved to get high.

Dear friend, can you hear me?
I was young and stupid and didn’t know
who to call.
I’m sorry.
And I wish I had found these words
the autumn afternoon in the stacks
when you whispered a foolproof plan:

I love women.

Could that confession have saved you?

v. Guilt

Whatever I was busy with the last time
Mother called seemed important.
I was tenderly brusque?

Yes. And I let her down
almost as often as she asked for help.
At the estate sale, my sister and I

priced her things cheaply.
Now strangers sit at the round table
where she sat reading novels,

working the crossword.
Her second story view: cast-iron railing,
pink geraniums, patches of sky.

All that summer, unable to leave her
apartment,
she was so wistful asking,
is it a beautiful day?

Did it hurt that I never lied?
The air was sweet often, the bay
stretched blue,
mysterious as an infant’s eye.

O that last day I was busy with nothing.

Did she cry, after I hung up?
I see her trailing tubes through silent
rooms,
wheezing ghost of her own life.

vi. A never-ending line

Further back in the gloom
half-dissolved ancestors

sway in gusting wind—
grands, great-grands,

great-great-grands—
all the way back to

Belfast, Bavaria,
the Olduvai Gorge.

They jostle for attention,
voices mingled

in one long moan.
They are the sources

of one another’s joy and grief,
carried on a current

that winds for millions of years.
I recognize my eyes,

the tilt of my chin,
chittering beat of my heart.

I am their greatest achievement,
their vessel and sediment.

I am headed their way,
but not before I’ve had my turn.

I pull down the shade,
take out a pen.

Christina Hauck

The Company of Ghosts