Ghost Voices

Hush, Luster said. Looking for them ain’t going to do no good, they’re gone.
—William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Despite the meaning of its name, “place where it frosts,” on the two occasions I visited Nahuatzen the weather was muggy and humid. The first time, I must have been thirteen going on fourteen. Each summer my paternal grandparents took a road trip to México to visit relatives and deliver clothing they had been gathering all year at the flea markets.

1. The Mask of Sorrow

From a hilltop above the North Pacific seaport of Magadan, Russia, The Mask of Sorrow—a 50-foot monument that resembles an Easter Island head—overlooks the city. You keep glimpsing this concrete memorial from afar as you move about town, passing Stalin-era buildings downtown, skirting abandoned construction sites, puzzling over the sight of two fighter jets perched on a huge steel structure over a creek, as if they had snagged themselves while flying under the radar.

Old wood best to burn; old friends best to trust—thus said Athenaeus, etiquette guru of the third century C.E., a man whose fifteen-volume work, The Gastronomers, about an epic night’s conversation, is one of our greatest odes to companionship.

My shoes touch the ground. They connect me to the earth, the floor, the stairs. They translate me from one surface of the world to the next. My weight leaves marks.

After long naps, the children on beach vacation

sip Dr. Chek and wonder why they’re eating

hot dogs for breakfast. The black cherry cola

stains their mouths awestruck. Somewhere

“Magic Mountain Pkwy—2 miles,” the green sign jeers.

There’s barely time to veer far right, and claim

last place in a line of cars that seems stopped

dead. Still, slow as a fault, we grind ahead.

let’s flay it open: find the tea

in tear and moan in lemon

the obsession in the one obsessed

with sectioning the body into inside and

the “wordless thing” that covers it

Taking with you some memory of the crabapples.

Of London and the cemetery fog. You

in a corner of the room, looking out

the bay window with all the nearly-

Drawbridges over the Seine steam up and down

levitating over long fly-boats that ply the flashing

waters which all day transport oil slicks of guilt

and all night spin black whirlpools of doubt.

Abandoned in that maze, raised by those walls.

Quarry must be, from the start, to hunt

the raw block you seek, the translucent

skin, the span without fault, the clear

milk-white eye of myth. Stone that will hold

There is a woman who whistles

from the arroyo— oh hollow bone

you have a body

you cannot carry alone.

I wake on this path of this path supine beneath swaying fronds and boughs

with the woman watching me and over me wondering at our fled cities our myriad parents all younger now than we

Laugh But the jaws of the drugged tiger will equal the sage friendless on her brilliant point

Wind will batter the tents and awaken the one who peers out for the storm but meets stars only

Bright with light, the flag

ripples on the Jumbotron

as they ask those who’ve served

Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale


And so, he declared, the Arno, plague of mirrors, another –
river of suicides. You almost hallucinate. The air
and we in it, wedged in the beeswax of the clay-built corners. The streets’
recesses hemorrhage with summer light. So many

Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale


To extinguish the lamp and the bright words.
The vase stares flush against its own bottom.
At the foot of the bed jazz flares up,
opening a crack

Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale


In old age (so think thirty year olds) there is beauty.
Crystals of sugar melting – the city
lights are extinguished. Resignation,
the road slows down departing into the muggy flourlike fog