Why are we in conversation and not at it? We converse with each other, not through. My cat beside the keyboard is not on top of it, but she’s in the frame my glasses hold up. Half clear, half a blur, her head a ginger topography, old stream beds between her ears. The podcast is at it, certainly, conversation you can’t join in, small talk at high volume, filling the space between my ears. It’s between us, without any invitation to respond except as Anonymous. There’s an old telephone center in my skull, an underpaid worker pushing pegs into holes to connect us, though only our sound waves touch. Her cousin was on the boundary of life and death, my friend says, realizing she had no photos. You can’t see now what was so clear then, clarity as both not-seeing and a seeing-through. The woman of ash emerges from a crevice to visit those who are bereaved; what happens next is Netflix suspense. Is grief a form of question posed without immediate answer? Is the question rhetorical? My conversations with my ghosts feel two way, though I only hear myself. Reincarnation is image, memory, someone standing in your skull’s sculpture hall. The writing is on their wall.
I say things to them now I kept from them then, and hold back on facts that might kill them now. If they were killed again by Trump on day one, could we not take him to court? Only if other ghosts impeached him. Trump renders us all ghostly, wandering the corridors of a building that no longer exists. When I went back to my apartment in London, it wasn’t there, and no one remembered its having been there, one floor over a damp garage. Lennon’s death is, in part, contained in that leaky flat. The podcast on his life is spoken through my phone, earth’s chatterer, like a waterfall. Asked why he never called back, he said he was too “self-involved.”
I hear wind before it hits the palms, like sound waves breaking before speech. An object bangs outside, as if to give the wind sounds form. Another wind-set approaches; it’s a kind of suspense that’s usually solved, except in a typhoon. Bird songs sound static inside. I’m talking to myself again, cat now on my lap, a container ship of memories in my head. In bad weather, containers fall off their ships. A river of Nikes runs through it. A boy found a piece of plastic on a Big Island beach. He vowed to learn what the writing said in Japanese.
Note: some references are to the podcast Another Kind of Mind, about the Beatles.
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