The heavens are salt gray
and the sound of soft thudding
is the only proof of me
in the vacant slot between night and morning.

Each thud presents itself to all my senses:
a heartbeat,
a blink,
the soft shock running through my knees
when my feet hit the sand.

I stop,
and so does the thud
as I pull in the pangs of sea air.

I try to remember if I was walking or running.

Thud, it goes.
Now felt by none of my senses,
something intensely non-physical,
without sharpness,
devoid of definition.

Crackling snow on a dusty TV,
suggesting an idea of lateness.

Late
is the thud that comes to me.
My father
and how I feel him with every sense,
then none at all
as I lose him all over again
in every heartbeat,
blink,
and footstep.

Shapeless memories
are all we are offered of the dead.

Pictures that fade.
Stories too,
and even love.
But never the pain,
sensitive and senseless
always there
in every thud.

I bury my face in the wet sand
and kiss the holy ocean,
the only religion that ever brought me peace,
and I have swum in them all.

Yet even here I am unbaptized,
absent are my father’s eyes.
Ash now,
like his smile,
his broad chest,
that bitter, smoky smell of his.
Scattered over an infinite expanse of ocean.

But I imagine he is here.
Some chunk or fragment,
atom of molecule,
has worked its way here
between the salt and sand.

So I kiss the wet ground
knowing maybe,
even against infinitesimal odds,
I am kissing his cheek.

And here he is not trembling,
not soundless,
not empty.

Here I feel him
and I feel nothing.
Thud.

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.

There is somewhere
I have never gone to
yet I have
always been.

There is blackness there,
but there is light too;
the candle dance
of ubiquitous stars
untouchably far away.

There is a moon,
thought I do not know it,
and the pearl of strange nebulae
yet to become friends
to the soil bound.

The days and nights
shuffle
as I wish
space
time
like fields and oceans
instead of roads and rivers.

I can see the moment
those first stars
opened their eyes
without a hint of hubris.

An endless mosaic of years,
eras and eons
captured in a moment:
like pebbles of sand
slipping through an hourglass,
waiting to turn again.

I observe,
a fish in an endless bowl,
yet I am still on the inside
of nothing.

There is a dais
and a small helm
which calls for a captain's hands,
waiting
in the center of nothing.

I turn it
with eager reluctance
past two thousand nine hundred and twenty ticks
of days,
sailing back past seas of stars
I've already seen.

I start
the celestial clockwork
going again;
the planets, comets,
suns and moons,
all the movements, crashes, and orbits
from the night my father died.

I weigh my anchor
at the crux of my small life,
and sift through
the universal indifference,

Combing through the indexes and atlases
of the heavens,
searching for some sign
of a flitting or fleeting light
called out from our Earth,
which seems to be heading home.

i never seem to fall asleep.

it is a ****
a crack,
like a snap of the neck
that heals itself when I wake,

afraid of the feathers in my pillows
and whatever they are singing
to the me
who wants to stay in this bed
until the sun has made the shift in its allotropes
and blue is black again,

the me who gulped his coffee
and always ordered french fries with his meals,
who always felt tired enough
that nothing was worth doing.

i feel his face in the folds of my pillowcase,
and tell myself that i am not him
unless i choose to be.

i am always somewhat convinced.

Here
it seems the water is always churning.
Always white and gray and
never clear
until the winter comes.

Maybe like me
it understands certain seasons
better than others.
It understands that I am a son to snowfall
but simply a second cousin to soft breeze and summer haze.
It understands that I am unsure why
we call it Spring
but never wondered the same for Fall.

We know each other as well as the seasons
this water and I
who have changed together so much,
frozen and emptied,
silent when they sing the Christmas Carols,
but reborn and baptized with the first rain;
quiet and kind to each other,
not white and gray
or even clear,
just half dark with a hint of pearl
in the after midnight,
more empty than we cared to admit,
glad we were not churning
but morose for it as well.

This water stays fixed
and I am never so
but we change together all the same:
freezing and melting,
solid and liquid,
but never feeling
like more than a vapor,
lilting above the August heat
and the bite of March.

We have hidden together
when the basin is dry
and the square is empty
except for me
sitting with my friend,
knowing the water is still running somewhere below,
less a thought than a feeling
that we can rise again,
that I have dried up also.

To walk quietly with you in the rain,
the ferries calling their greetings
and farewells,
the blur of Ellis Island out in the fog,
taught me how every color becomes brighter in my mind
as it softens in my eyes.

This is why the New Year should not come
with the calendar
but simply arise from within
as all of our cardiac clocks and gears turn,
at their own pace,
until at last the cycle revolves
and the year is new.

The droplets and rivulets slide from the rooftops
and park walls;
they come to rest on your face,
so calmly receptive like the rest of you,
and I am reset;
ready to begin again.

We steel ourselves,
ready to fall,
knowing the rise will come.
We reach our redoubt: just a subway station,
but the rain makes it feel like so much more.
I am baptized in water you have somehow made holy.
My mind is silken and freshly made
and we are heading home,
running in our rain.

Here the rain has come and gone for the day.

The windows are dripping as the fire is burning
and the sun sets the clouds aflame.

Breathe in the swish of salt air, and the spice
of all the earth
that tumbles down the hillsides; born again,
and lies safe in the garden,
punctuating the perfume
of dusk,
rich with smoke, laden with the words of the sea.

It breathes again and so do you,
learning that even a crash can come softly.
Here peace and quiet will come as surely as spring
as the fog melts away.

Here the hawks are singing in their perfect silence,
and the rocks are wrestling the waves
as only brothers do.

Here the dove cries its mourning as it turns east again,
and the breeze calls you somewhere forgotten.

Here the sun is dripping through the cracks in the clouds;
its distant diamonds are drifting to sea.

Here the bluffs are steadfast and the trees are alive
and when you sleep, the ocean—it whispers.
Of all the lullabies, hers is the oldest,
the most calm, the softest, the coldest.

Here the ocean froths white in the still dawning hours
as it laughs along with the gulls.
At noon it leaps aground on the cliffs
and the sun twists its mists into rainbows.

Here hours are eons and a week is a breath,
for nothing stays gold but the sun.

Here the stars are much closer when the sky ripples black
and the Earth is not all that there is.

Here the food holds new flavors and the wine tastes far richer;
each breath grants new life on its own.

But listen
to each wave as it tells you the lesson
the ocean itself knows too well:
though all time here is yours
it should never be squandered,
love and learn all of this
while it lasts.