GHOST NOTES

for my father

Three in the morning, home,
he'd wake my mother and me and pack us
into the Ford, the back seat and pillow
mine. I think of the wasp sting I got once,
reaching under the pillow that was half the certainty I knew.

*

Always cigarettes, the breath, stubble
on the leather face my mother stroked
under the Stetson. The war,
the bugle he brought home one night, late,
waking me to see if I could get a sound from it:

I couldn't. I hear his guitar,
the Wabash Cannonball he'd pick at for hours--
and for years my train dreams always
had men playing guitars,
hundreds of cars racing over southern rises, gone.
I'm humming along, looking for the key.

And the marksman's medal I'd taken
from his bureau before my mother and I
got on the train for New York. Or wish I'd taken.

He built a box kite with me
when I was six,
knew time was part of the gift,
the blue gift
plunging in the distance,
or soaring in midnight thermals, testing the thread.

*

The guitar of the ghost seldom plays now
but when it does, it is not the notes
I hear that touch most,
but the ghost notes,
the notes unplayed, rumbling by the shore.

~Paul McRay

ASHES

My mother is at the Post Office,
elemental,

and I cannot go to get her, make
any excuse, ignore her in the interest

of--anything. The notice comes again,
in rain, unavoidable.

Is the package bulky, is she there,
this woman whose head was mere skull

in my hands last summer, this woman
eating two Percodans every four hours

around the clock, this woman
who said of the man in the soap opera,

He's a good president, don't you think?
Finally my son Matthew brings the bronze box home.

~Paul McRay

LANDSCAPE

You're in a fast food place
and this plain old guy
sits down at the table across from you.

He's got on two-year-old Knapp boots,
soiled in the way work soils, and his coat
is like one you'd see on a 4th grader
in Buffalo, orange and green and yellow
checks, a fake sheepskin collar,

polyfill guts spilling out down by the kidney.
It's dinnertime and before him
is a cardboard dish with 99› fries
and a cardboard cup of coffee hot enough
to scald. The mouth

in his day-old beard
starts moving, even though he's alone,
and you know he's speaking
not to you as you eye your food,
but to God. To God. This happened

last night
and all you can think of
today is some sad kid in Buffalo
learning the prayers he'll need to grow up
in America.

~Paul McRay