she's gone...she's gone...
A poem.
(Image Credit: Marcela McGreal)
I felt the dead but did not know them yet
after my love & I moved to the Heights
in early winter. light snow patches
clung to Green-Wood Cemetery's shoulders
& made the headstones & tombs look
primeval beneath morning's cloud-woven
blueness. those first days
when she joined the rush of bodies
from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I left home
& ascended the cemetery hill
& watched the city writhe
like a motherboard come alive.
I knew then: people walk these grounds
that you or I cannot see.
but these presences, my friends said,
were nothing more
than the pen-strokes of the imagination.
the mind, you see, is an ancient machine
that conjures shapes & cries out
the names of gods & spirits
when it becomes afraid of the dark.
so I buried my thoughts
& at night in loose bed-sheets
I gazed at the bars of light
coming in through the window
& told myself it was light
& nothing more.
but then I heard them sing.
the mind can make a cage of the body
sometimes, doubly so at the edge
between waking life and our dreams.
they call it "sleep paralysis"
when the brain recoils
& all you want to do is leap
from the body’s sinking ship,
force yourself upward
& gasp for air when you surface.
I’m no stranger to this:
the silent struggle,
the primal terror
when you’re desperate
to feel & be alive.
but four nights ago
I felt that familiar pull,
& each time I emerged
I shook off a strange gravity
like someone was watching
from the railing as I jumped.
as I slipped back into that unease
it rose again, a mental crag,
a presence, something or somethings
through the walls of my apartment
& all the way through
the iron bars & the juniper trees
that border the cemetery.
I could not see them
but I felt their gathering,
their closeness, their lament:
she’s gone...she’s gone...
a group of them, intoning as one:
she’s gone...she’s gone...
my body immobile,
I urged fingers then hands then arms
to move, forced sound through my throat,
pleading with every ounce of life within me
to escape--and then I did,
& the voices were gone, & I was me again,
shuddering & groping for my glasses.