Ghost Town Reverie
Rippling waves of incoherence
Washing from a gaggle of gossipy runners
Fluttering past the open summer window
Burning energy with mindless talk,
restless motion, communing through
Long avenues named for long dead men
Occupied today by new folk, rootless
inhabiting only now, making their love
Their life severed from history
Insensate to the ghosts
Whose air they breathe
Whose place they fill
Whose substance they dispossess.
Waves of incoherence rippling my mind
Walking now these ghosted streets
as a sad man returned to a lost lover
All intimate physical familiarity
devoid of passion, connection, meaning
haunted by the hollowness, straining
to hear, capture, comprehend now, or
Know some well-remembered face, place
Seize again, hold, some shadow
Born of our here story, our
Living, loving, laughing indelibly
On the vast time-scape of the prairie
Life a long mosaic of options taken
History the obverse of those overlooked
Nostalgia imagining substance
In the vacancies, abandoned emptiness.
Marching regrets inevitable as the
Corners turned one way or another
Inhabited with almost tangible
Ghosts of lives, lovers, homes
Lost to time and choice, imaginings
of place, moment, whispers of rippling voices
echoing along the avenues, across the years.
About this: Returning after 20 years to what was once a home town, I found that only the geography is permanent. The people, who define and are it’s life, are always transient, cast against a ghostly landscape of other people’s history.