Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’ Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door —
Only this and nothing more.”
The opposite of walk?
A psychic with a crystal ball
and tarot deck
who sees green
when your palm is read.
At the sign of a red palm
I don’ t walk,
I run.
Winter is fallen early
On the house of Stare;
Birds in reverberating flocks
Haunt its ancestral box;
Bright are the plenteous berries
In clusters in the air.
See this house, how dark it is
Beneath its vast-boughed trees!
Not one trembling leaflet cries
To that Watcher in the skies —
‘Remove, remove thy searching gaze,
Innocent of heaven’ s ways,
Brood not, Moon, so wildly bright,
On secrets hidden from sight.’
Dark frost was in the air without,
The dusk was still with cold and gloom,
When less than even a shadow came
And stood within the room.
But of the three around the fire,
None turned a questioning head to look,
Still read a clear voice, on and on,
Still stooped they o’ er their book.
1
Now footsteps on shingle. Make of it what you will. Seabirds roost
on the breakwaters, accustomed, of course, to twilight.
The spirit lamp in that house on the headland could easily fall and spill
and the fire burn all night. Some time later a subtle ghost,
yourself in memory perhaps, might well set foot
up there amid clinker and smoke, the whole place silent and still
except you bring in the tic of cooling timbers, and then the birds in flight.
•
Now chains through gravel. Make of it what you will.
for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959,
recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959
They love me so muchthey have imagined me dead because they fear the loss of my genius above all elseHow literarylike Huck FinnEveryone will be weeping
The Desultory Slut
Do you have one of my books to sign?
Oh nocan you please sign here?
Isn’ t it greatThe old bastard finally kicked
Ta daaa!
Wait, I’ m not dead at all. Here I am. It was all a mistake
Do you realize what this means? This means we’ re free
He’ s dead, he’ s dead. Our enemy is finally dead
Whoso list to haunt could do worse than to
Obtain the license, get the picture.
Spook finders must find spooks to put the face,
Name and space coordinates together.
What is kept in the mind perimeter
Retains a wild autonomy through fate.
I will retreat to the precorporate.
Let fate have what is fate’ s and allow
This spirit to slip through time’ s difficult
Nets with the devious fingers of
A wild wind, while I run along behind.
