A September Ghost (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

A September Ghost



1
When a woman vanishes it’s because she’s shifted weight
From the right foot to the left and in a moment
She’s gone on to the unending renewal of the commonplace
She is a song and a sigh and the blink of an eye
And she goes down the street as unnoticed and as mechanically
As a projectile carving an arc of white in the westerly end of the heavens
The figure is as much a blur as she is the cracking of a radio
When she’s not a discarded wine bottle rolling in the gutter
In a windy and sunless Wednesday afternoon and it’s her
Passing through camouflaged with an angel’s winged invisibility
That it amounts to (because it can’t be anything else)
And that it is not expected but which is visited
On the impatient and the keen to find what isn’t there
And the melody and its duration vary with the light
The eye captures it and fails to capture it and does not redeem it
Just as the image precedes the flesh and bone incarnation
And when it does arrive it’s with a massive gray sky collapsing
And shadows crack and split in doorways up the avenue
And not long thereafter rain fills the distance
And hollows out the space for voices and the flapping of wings
As the eye strains to the edges and reclaims threads of light
And as the ear can not cope
And fails to conquer the nettle-like silence of paneless windows
Cemented and boarded up and encrusted with the history
Cemented and boarded up with the whisperings
And the daily perfidies and the wastage of love
And of the decline and demise of an imprisoned and tortured soul
For it is the history of a ruined and abandoned tenement building in Harlem
Where she might have resided seventy-five years earlier
And has returned to haunt it
And in having reappeared she does the summing up


2

It’s the something sinister (it wasn’t always)
In a woman’s gaze and in her gait
It is also something in a street one’s not counted on
But that one has wandered into and crosses and gapes at waiting
For the moment to slip away and change and return one’s heart to safety
It’s then that time collapses and that it assigns the danger of the end
And its culmination to a woman (to this woman)
Shifting her weight from one foot to the other
The ceremony is concluded when she strolls off
To the rattling and shaking of her heels and her shoulders and hips
Because she’s not concerned (she can not be) this unclaimed woman
This uncharted and unwritten and undiscovered and unrevealed woman
With the cold September wind blowing and pushing behind her

© J. Noya, 2009