"The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence."

For Poetry Monday, another ghost story:


Hotel Window, Edward Hirsch

Aura of absence, vertigo of non-being --
could I ever express what happened?
It was nothing, really, or next to nothing.

I was standing at the window at dusk
watching the cabs or the ghosts of cabs
lining up on the other side of the street

like yellow ferryboats waiting to cross
a great divide. All afternoon the doorman
whistled through the shadows, Charon

slamming doors and shouting orders
at traffic piling up along the curb.
People got into cars and disappeared --

ordinary people, tourists, businessmen --
while fog thickened the city's features
and emptied out the color. I don't know

how long I stood there as darkness
inhabited air itself, but suddenly,
when it happened, everything seemed dis-

jointed, charged with non-existence,
as if a vast, drowned lake was rising
invisibly- permanently- from the ground.

At the same time nothing really changed,
footsteps still echoed in the hallway
and laughter flared up the stairwell,

the passengers flinging themselves into cabs
never noticed they were setting forth
on a voyage away from their bodies.

I felt within a sickening emptiness --
intangible, unruly -- and I remember
lying down on the floor of the room ...

Then the phone rang and it was over.
Nothing happened -- it took only a moment --
and it was dizzying, relentless, eternal.


Hirsch was born in 1950 and is still writing and publishing poetry, criticism, and guides to reading poetry.

---L.

Subject quote from Maurice Ravel, responding to criticism that "Le tombeau de Couperin" wasn't somber enough.