I don’t think it’s so bad to see ghosts.
I imagine
it would be like a movie or music video,
something simple
just appearing, oddly, in the open air instead.
It might be cool.
My problem is that I smell ghosts.
They don’t glide or vanish,
they waft and linger,
cloying in their persistence.
[My father has been dead nearly 9 years
and to see his face
is pain,
lancing lightly in the belly
and boiling in my blood.
But there is no sight, no pain with the ghosts.]
Only the smells that I know
mean love and softness.
Trojan horses, riding down the shortest drawbridge to the brain.
With one whiff of aftershave, filled with chestnuts
I am whipped into sharp light and hospital rooms
where I am thirteen, shaking and empty,
my face nuzzled fiercely into my dad’s chest,
refusing to be called away,
breathing as deeply as I know how,
hoping to capture him in the only sense left of him.
Knowing noise and sight are well beyond him now,
and every inch of skin is ice.
The rich cologne wafts back into my windpipe
leaving me tasting lilacs,
and I am beyond sleep.
These eerie perfumes
are with me everywhere:
hot dogs, sunscreen, leather gloves,
barbeque, disinfectant and California poppies
find me on the street or in the park
and shove me aside,
laughing with hate at any living done in the present.
They show me the man I love more than anything
still
through pure synesthesia,
a rainbow of smells past every day
of my first thirteen years.
“How dare you,” the age old scents cry,
“You are not allowed to let this man leave your mind,
who everyone you now know has forgotten.”
I am desperate to disagree
to disregard
but how can I
in the face of raspberry lime sugar syrup
and the airborne dust,
heavy in the Arizona heat of Spring Training.
At least a decade ago. More.
I am eight years old
and the boom of his laugh is shaking me,
squeezed inside the safest of all bear hugs.
So why should I ignore this guilt
my ghosts have brought to me?
Why would I wish to be twenty-one,
a man myself,
cold and quiet in New York City;
when I can breathe deeply, swim backwards in time
and feel him there—
my dad, as bright and loud as ever
branded under my eyelids,
hiding in every wisp of pine smoke and almond soap.
For his smile,
his hugs,
his chuckle,
his crowded workbench, sooty aprons and tattered baseball cards;
for him,
I will happily be haunted.