A Gallery of Ghosts

By John Gery

Paperback, 6"x9", 250 pages

ISBN:0-9728143-3-7

March 2008

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II.

A Pack of Lies

For Jonathan Edwards & Eugene McCarthy, two U.S.
servicemen killed in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq,
1–3 February 1991

There’s an Arab saying that when you tell someone
that a man has died, he asks,
“Is he dead and buried or is he just dead?”
 Fouad Ajami, journalist

Lie #1: That Penelope Resisted Scores of Suitors

I’m not convinced that woman wanted him
ever to come back home. She had her business
in tapestries, those three‑hour meals with men,
and Telemachus, who it’s true was dim
and narrow, some said not unlike Ulysses,
but still his mother’s toy.  And after ten

or more years, don’t all lovers seem the same
in memory? One man surmounts the teeming,
well‑meaning invitations, only to pout
when she, like Hera, claims she’s not to blame
for his interminable lust and dreaming.
The man wants her to take him; she wants out

of the question of desire altogether,
on his terms. So she starts to count completely
not on Ulysses’ missing, but on facts
like ships we watch crossing against the weather
toward the world’s edge, which shimmer discretely,
then disappear when some small flick distracts

our curious eyes. You couldn’t pin her down,
not that one. Cooler to the touch than the prick
of a needle, she had mastered her delay
with vague unweavings, building her renown
on nothing but a calculated trick
to cover black and white with seamless grey,

to keep the fools like me coming around
drooling like basset hounds. It’s often so:
The facts protect the ones who want to lie
alone, while those for whom nothing is sound
muddle, splash and drown. Sometimes, though,
we also sail, blindly, into the sky.

The Wrong Tormented Sea

I am as dumb as anyone, of course.
     I just can’t accept it. Educate!
they cried back in the 60s, with all the force
     of Magellan sailing through his strait,

he who discovered in the Phillipines
     one head is worth one coconut.
I’ve never learned to dwell within my means.
     Across my ship’s top deck I strut,

assuming immortality will follow
     since I’ve surveyed the seas of Homer          
and stomached all the Plato I could swallow,
     bellying up amid the foam or,

when tossed in rougher waters, Aristotle.
     I’ve stayed this course for years on end.
Yet aimless as a message in a bottle,
     barely afloat, I can’t pretend

any longer I can see which horizon
     my navigators had in mind,
nor that the craft a person lives and dies in
     can outperform its paradigm.

Your Average Piecework

All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
Emerson
 
     What if my personality
were surgically detached, like so much fat
     cut from thighs too long cushioned
by chocolate, beer and long days sitting at

     some desk? Would anybody notice,
when I entered a room, my sense of humor
     missing? Or if I laughed, would friends,
in treating me as though I’d had a tumor

     removed, not mention it and smile
that grim smile athletes do at those they’ve beaten
     in the early heats—triumphant, cruel?
The baggy clothes I now hide my conceit in

     I’d throw away, as though to say
this me is me, like you and you and you,
     is nothing richer than a heap
of average piecework—bone, disease, and glue—

     a casual combination of
divine wet meat, which I pretend to own
     when really, universally,
we’re all things each and never each alone.