Skull House

You begin to realize
It’s almost all a haunting—
Given two of the three kinds

Of being in your life are
Not themselves present humans—
Those being the nonhuman

Presences and the absence
Or, rather, ghostly presence
Of humans absent in flesh.

You can forget this, talking
To a friend at a table,
To your daughter in the car,

But even then, nearly half
Or more of conversations
Are about beings never

Met in person, and the rest,
Of course, about some humans
Alive but not present or

Whom you knew once, who’ve since died.
Who do you interact with
When there is no body there?

You can answer, memories,
Or the writers you admire,
Or the actors you’re watching

Who were recorded somewhere.
They’re all mixed up together,
Your hauntings, your varied ghosts,

And they’re the real ones, not sheets
Shivering in night’s corners,
Just a horde of personas

However you first knew them,
However faint, vaporous,
Fragmentary, the persons

Bound together by language,
Many no more than language,
That crowd the house of your skull.