April Poetry: Conquest & How a Ghost Dissolves

In recognition of Poetry Month, and to celebrate our treasure trove of Orcas Island poets, Orcas Issues is pleased and honored to offer daily poetry during April.

Conquest

A fly lands on my pen this morning —
slender, small, with elegant pointed head.
He likes the smooth white shank, the blue
clicker, looks on attentively
at scrawl spilling onto page,
cocks his head this way, then that.
Does he miss his flock
of circling zig-zagging kin
making their air sculptures?

hello, little friend;
welcome to this pen.

Now he’s on the sleeve
of my green rain jacket,
has claimed me as his empire
and likely
has shat on me, much as we
might plant a U.S. flag on distant Mars,
thinking that our marking of a planet
makes it ours.

© Sadie Bailey

How a Ghost Dissolves

By increments
you start to forget
how he looked; he,
on whose skin you mapped
galaxies of moles and scars
with trembling fingertips.
Life in a body leaves a person marked.

Later
you strain to recollect
exact curve of his cheek, shape
of his hand.
You can’t remember much of what he said.
No longer clear, his face –
its features blur, and merge
with all the empty spaces that he left.

Ever so slowly
You lose the light that shined blue
in his clouds of raven hair.
The sound of his voice
fades, its timbre indistinct;
he’s flown long ago
out of this life
into the waiting air

and soon,
just like it is
when trees and buildings
you knew well are razed,
and new ones in their place,
you can’t remember
how it looked before – the trees,
lay of the land – and just like that
he’s only a mirage of what he was,

until
all that remains
in the mist of his slow departure
held in your sorrowed heart
is the music
of his laughter
clear as bells.