Caleb Curtiss
Ghost
My sister thinks she is a ghost:
at work, in her car, at home
fixing herself a slice of toast for breakfast
or blow drying her hair
in her bathroom mirror, pausing from time to time
to recite in her mind
the voice we have lost to the vacancy
our sister has become―
thoughts utterly useless to the living
or the dead, she can’t decide
precisely which, as she has
an ambivalence about her,
has become
lost in the ignorability of her grief,
mourning, sometimes, like I do
(a sparsely noticed breeze on a humid summer day),
and when I see her eating barbeque
in my back yard, or lip synching to the radio
as she pulls away, I am often far too careless,
letting myself believe that I am not dreaming.
I must apologize
for having taken her
from this world,
having stolen her
from another.
Cup & Saucer
Four years old, sun sick
and unaware of what the ocean will take,
my brother clambered up
the Cup and Saucer:
two rocks stacked one on top of the other:
one the size of a Buick, the other below it
a full-sized van
overlooking Buzzard’s Bay.
The bay was a bay, the ocean an ocean:
I could tell you more about them,
but they don’t matter as much as the kind of knowing
that overcame me upon seeing him there,
looking down as the tide sucked at the rocks,
the barnacles, a full story beneath his toes:
the serenity that comes in knowing how the world
could change suddenly, irrevocably:
the serenity in knowing how the friction
that keeps us here
won’t hold forever.
Not even fifteen years later,
after picking him up from his shift,
I remind him of this
before telling him how our sister, Elisabeth,
who had been sunbathing further down the pier,
hadn’t made it to the other side
of an intersection that morning.
Of course, when I’m finished,
there isn’t anything worth saying
and so we’re left with what we’re always left with:
the line that separates then and now,
the line that threads together our moments,
passing through us as it goes.
Elegy
I found you on a beach this time,
lying with your heels on its shoreline,
your back flush with its changing sand,
and you were staring at me with the two
cowry shells I set
over each of your eyes.
Or were you asleep?
Were your eyes
closed like the bodies
of two barnacles?
_
It was cold, and you lay there,
not my sister,
eyes locked irenically, shells
still as stone thumbs,
almost fragile,
as if the slightest movement,
a bump in the road,
a dream, would have them fall
from your face
and onto the shore, the floor
of our van
weaving its way back from the beach.
Or had you made it
into a new time altogether?
To Odessa? Varna? Istanbul?
Had you let your feet
hang over a salt mine,
waiting for it to fill
with sea again?
_
I expect you to stir,
even breathe, but you couldn’t
have heard me sitting there,
couldn’t have felt the ribbed
arc of those shells floating
upon the flesh
above your eyes.
_
And then,
not suddenly, you were sitting:
you were sitting all along
not unusually,
and because the sun was setting,
making the sky and the sea go red
making the horizon more of an idea
rather that something that either of us
could actually point to,
we sat together, the shore
washing over our feet, our heels, and then our toes,
and it was cold, but we watched it rise
and did not move as it filled the space between us,
defining our divisions as a strait divides land.
Like the Bosporus always flowing into the Black Sea
draining its oxygen
letting the hulls of thousand year old ships
remain whole, un-eroded, we were beneficiaries
of a loophole in time.
_
You were lying on a beach,
though I can’t remember
ever doing this: you’re just there,
your body
a bundle of synapses,
waves swaying over you:
back and forth,
like the chassis
of an overturned car
steadying itself beside a corn field,
a stop sign.
_
When I wake up,
I will remember this:
sheets, my dog
curled up in them
like a crustacean
in the rookery of a bent leg.
I will remember a phone,
waking up
on a couch,
hearing the direct current
of our father’s no pass through
a receiver,
and register again and again
in in my temporal lobe
like a prayer I could not answer.
Like I remember
how you once filled up an entire
sand pale with mollusk shells,
how they shimmered
like a toenails in the afternoon sun,
how you threw
a handful of them into the air
like coins: a memory
half-lost in the twisting
synapses of a moment past:
the present tense of your absence
tangible for a moment
and then not, lost
but not done,
waiting like I waited for you
behind a stack of rocks―waited
so I could startle you, let you hate me
for a moment:
my laughter
washing away in the sound
of the waves
rising once more:
reciting in perpetuity
a necessary erosion.
Caleb Curtiss's writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary magazines including New England Review, The Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Redivider, PANK, and Hayden's Ferry Review. He lives in Champaign, IL where he teaches high school English and edits poetry for Hobart.
Return to January 2013 Edition
My sister thinks she is a ghost:
at work, in her car, at home
fixing herself a slice of toast for breakfast
or blow drying her hair
in her bathroom mirror, pausing from time to time
to recite in her mind
the voice we have lost to the vacancy
our sister has become―
thoughts utterly useless to the living
or the dead, she can’t decide
precisely which, as she has
an ambivalence about her,
has become
lost in the ignorability of her grief,
mourning, sometimes, like I do
(a sparsely noticed breeze on a humid summer day),
and when I see her eating barbeque
in my back yard, or lip synching to the radio
as she pulls away, I am often far too careless,
letting myself believe that I am not dreaming.
I must apologize
for having taken her
from this world,
having stolen her
from another.
Cup & Saucer
Four years old, sun sick
and unaware of what the ocean will take,
my brother clambered up
the Cup and Saucer:
two rocks stacked one on top of the other:
one the size of a Buick, the other below it
a full-sized van
overlooking Buzzard’s Bay.
The bay was a bay, the ocean an ocean:
I could tell you more about them,
but they don’t matter as much as the kind of knowing
that overcame me upon seeing him there,
looking down as the tide sucked at the rocks,
the barnacles, a full story beneath his toes:
the serenity that comes in knowing how the world
could change suddenly, irrevocably:
the serenity in knowing how the friction
that keeps us here
won’t hold forever.
Not even fifteen years later,
after picking him up from his shift,
I remind him of this
before telling him how our sister, Elisabeth,
who had been sunbathing further down the pier,
hadn’t made it to the other side
of an intersection that morning.
Of course, when I’m finished,
there isn’t anything worth saying
and so we’re left with what we’re always left with:
the line that separates then and now,
the line that threads together our moments,
passing through us as it goes.
Elegy
I found you on a beach this time,
lying with your heels on its shoreline,
your back flush with its changing sand,
and you were staring at me with the two
cowry shells I set
over each of your eyes.
Or were you asleep?
Were your eyes
closed like the bodies
of two barnacles?
_
It was cold, and you lay there,
not my sister,
eyes locked irenically, shells
still as stone thumbs,
almost fragile,
as if the slightest movement,
a bump in the road,
a dream, would have them fall
from your face
and onto the shore, the floor
of our van
weaving its way back from the beach.
Or had you made it
into a new time altogether?
To Odessa? Varna? Istanbul?
Had you let your feet
hang over a salt mine,
waiting for it to fill
with sea again?
_
I expect you to stir,
even breathe, but you couldn’t
have heard me sitting there,
couldn’t have felt the ribbed
arc of those shells floating
upon the flesh
above your eyes.
_
And then,
not suddenly, you were sitting:
you were sitting all along
not unusually,
and because the sun was setting,
making the sky and the sea go red
making the horizon more of an idea
rather that something that either of us
could actually point to,
we sat together, the shore
washing over our feet, our heels, and then our toes,
and it was cold, but we watched it rise
and did not move as it filled the space between us,
defining our divisions as a strait divides land.
Like the Bosporus always flowing into the Black Sea
draining its oxygen
letting the hulls of thousand year old ships
remain whole, un-eroded, we were beneficiaries
of a loophole in time.
_
You were lying on a beach,
though I can’t remember
ever doing this: you’re just there,
your body
a bundle of synapses,
waves swaying over you:
back and forth,
like the chassis
of an overturned car
steadying itself beside a corn field,
a stop sign.
_
When I wake up,
I will remember this:
sheets, my dog
curled up in them
like a crustacean
in the rookery of a bent leg.
I will remember a phone,
waking up
on a couch,
hearing the direct current
of our father’s no pass through
a receiver,
and register again and again
in in my temporal lobe
like a prayer I could not answer.
Like I remember
how you once filled up an entire
sand pale with mollusk shells,
how they shimmered
like a toenails in the afternoon sun,
how you threw
a handful of them into the air
like coins: a memory
half-lost in the twisting
synapses of a moment past:
the present tense of your absence
tangible for a moment
and then not, lost
but not done,
waiting like I waited for you
behind a stack of rocks―waited
so I could startle you, let you hate me
for a moment:
my laughter
washing away in the sound
of the waves
rising once more:
reciting in perpetuity
a necessary erosion.
Caleb Curtiss's writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary magazines including New England Review, The Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Redivider, PANK, and Hayden's Ferry Review. He lives in Champaign, IL where he teaches high school English and edits poetry for Hobart.
Return to January 2013 Edition