Invitation to the Wild Ghost

in memory of Peter Wild

Be thankful that you are not among us
as the tobacco-squirting Harley you with tattoos,
the 1960 badass apparition riding free.

Be glad you're not the uniformed Catholic school you,
fidgeting for recess; the specter of a wagon boy
with a 1951 dinged-up brick of a radio.

Be grateful, because you could have been stuck
as the pipe-smoker, trying too hard, haunting us for eternity
in your poorly-fit 1982 sportcoat.

And though you hoped to stalk these halls
scampering around on your 2009 curmudgeonly cane,
I'm afraid you have been healed.
********************************From here on out, it's 1970,
and you will forever eat luminescent cottage cheese,
sitting reading villanelles in your first real office.

The Mustang

(ignore the *'s, it was the only way I could get that line break to look right)



When I finally got the man to pull the truck over,
there was already a long stripe of blood—
a new red-hot lane line slicing the freeway.
The bottom had fallen out of his horse trailer several miles back,
and, with a snap like an electric shock, the daydreaming mustang
was suddenly being dragged at 65.
*********************************The sandpaper ground
first through hoof, and then quickly through flesh.
362 horsepower against 1.

The beast's body swallowed by its eyes,
frantic, blitzed, boiling, thinking not of cause
or posterity; snorting exhaust, writhing,
running from its own stumped legs.
I realized I did not understand mercy
as the man shot it in the head.