Walter Holland
What Is It to Be a Talker to Ghosts?
What is it to be a talker to ghosts? To the visions of an eradicated infancy, maturity, as
immediacy is something less believed, and “why” dies. Where many and few exist, figures
that lived, unliving now throughout the day’s confusion,
a way which felt a way but feels now obscure, prevented. You people me like a disease. They are
the whispers that speak the long hour, tired animals gone to age and worry,
tired frames of flesh
fresh and young deceased to useless ceasing. Life seems calm and gentle, leaves of fall unhostile
fall as earth turns and time and past persist though they no longer exist.
Where have they gone, why care?
Everywhere gone when once so there. I was told this is the way. I was told that being fades to
stone and grave; dates from “b” to “d.” Everything’s a fiction. Place, things,
seconds, no longer appear sequentially.
Thought, pain, closeness. What good is old emotion? What good the memories of make and be?
Ghostly city of costly being. Ghostly city a ghostly world deceived. Needs
have turned to greed.
Haunt of haunts deceased, so it must, and so it goes. I’m your listener to nothing’s now, this now
of now that slows. I listen to the lost and see the loss of a world that leaves me
to grieve. Once so free and now bound,
struck down, the numberless and the nameless. Underground their ghostly leavings. Old voices
that recede. I hasten to free their stories, in feeling inexact and false, no ones
of eternity.
Walter Holland is the author of the poetry collections Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), and A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992), as well as of the novel The March (Chelsea Station Editions, 2011). His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Found Object, Phoebe, and other journals. Holland holds a doctorate in English literature from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and lives in New York City. Online at walterhollandwriter.com.
SUBMIT to HIV Here & Now via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem, consider making a donation to HIV Here & Now, a project of Indolent Arts Foundation and Indolent Books.
