The Ghosts Of My Gestures Fade

THE GHOSTS OF MY GESTURES FADE

Sometimes I feel I am peering through a one way mirror

into the faces that I see into certain gestures into time that falls

away as petals from the flower of them as shafts of sunlight from the darkening trees

I can see all these I can feel in each detail the scent of snow or sudden hail spiced mold of leaves the antique rose the parboiled

fairy tale making do for dinner

and yet

there is no echo back not even a tapping on the glass.

the orange studded with cloves I made my Grandmother for Christmas past

only the sense that I am acknowledged long enough for my answers to be copied onto someone else's paper'or marked

"present" as a necessary foil

it baffles me. Looking out;fending within and wondering

is my planet shrinking; fixed in its untwinkling

my orbit negligible now;am I the ghost of my ghost somehow and was I

really ever tangible here in a walk on part later cut from the scene

admiring the rainbow oilspots on the carports;bicycling

or do my footprints disappear in the vast snows in advance

of their accumulation forgoing all that gleaming fine is sugar snow

that cannot blow on earth updrafting into the ozone

and are my words patched through this seeming

beyond all I ever felt or knew crumpling their meteoric trace

straightening their errant crowns at last beyond this place

sucked through an unmarked door perhaps

by angels finishing up their malteds or where dreams cannot lapse

into the dimestore looking glass of the world

nor waves nor gulls at sea nor meaning as I first believed it

bypassing this dimension entirely

weary from invalidations crowding the puzzle years and

seeking only God.

mary angela douglas 8-9 october 2020