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Rick Mulkey 
My father writes to say the seven year locusts have hatched.
All night the whirring and clicking
in the maple and fir have kept him up. "Oh," he writes,
"how I hate that haunting voice." Hunter, not yet five,
decided last night he wanted to sleep with me.
He´d heard something outside, a monster he thought,
and though I´ve tried to explain about monsters
last night I accepted that fear has no explanation.
It arrives when it wishes, clicking just outside the glow
of the night light at 3:00 a.m. Yet, I admit
I´m at home with the ghosts. They accept me,
and I accept them in all their late night forms.
There´s one in my cousin´s three piece gray suit, another regular
in my aunt´s poodle skirt; there´s Steve, childhood friend
who´d lived up the hill, whose father claimed Jesus came to him at night,
sat upon his Italian leather sofa and offered business advice;
Steve, the preppy, even now dressed in khaki slacks,
striped oxford and blazer, and not a single scar to show
what guardrails and cars can do. My mother tells me that
Elvis, the only spirit she´ll claim, exists at the center
of a considerable debate between those who´ve spied him
sporting 1950´s chinos and those who´ve seen 1970´s sequins.
I no longer doubt any of this, or the psychics,
or that one day my fortune cookie numbers will win the lotto.
Besides, wasn´t it Wittgenstein or some other reasoning German
who said go ahead and believe, what harm can it do?
On the other hand, my friend Carol believes in one thing,
her fear of bridges. Carol has decided she could never
belong to any of the dark age´s religions in which the soul
had to cross a thin, thread-like bridge to find paradise. Fall off
and you´re lost forever. Take Carol across the bay from Tampa
to St. Pete, or across the Cooper River Bridge into Charleston,
and you´d might as well ask her to cut off her arms.
It isn´t the idea of falling or even dying--it´s the bridge itself,
as if it represents the worst kind of modern haunting,
the technological prowess of steel and concrete a living
marvel of torture, atoms exploding beneath those Firestone tires.
And why not? Even quantum mechanics, that newest of religions,
believes that reality is not only a product of the external world,
but is bound up with our perceptions of it. Still, Carol´s no Hart Crane
and I want to help, so I explain how in mythology, bridges
have almost always represented new life, good fortune,
that the Milky Way itself was once known as "The Bridge of Souls."
"No thanks," she says. "I´d rather go to hell
than cross a bridge to get to heaven."
In the face of that theory, how can I argue?
Though there are, of course, other theories. One described
by Thiselton Byer of Lancashire, that children born during twilight
have the peculiar ability to see places, events and people hidden to others.
Or the modern physics theory that "alternative worlds are not
always completely disconnected from our own: they overlap
our perceived universe." Or my personal favorite offered up
by Leonora Galigai, a convicted 17th century witch,
who, when asked by her judge how she had enchanted her victim,
replied "My spell was the power of a strong mind over a weak one."
Still I´m not sure how any of this can help my father
up past midnight listening to voices, dealing with memories,
real or perceived, that he´ll never reveal.
Or Hunter, awakened to a world of unrecognizable sounds and sights.
Or even me. I lied when I said I was o.k. with the ghosts.
There was one I never understood, never wanted to believe in.
He stood at the edge of my room, just days after I´d found him
dead outside his bath, his heart twisted into a knot,
my grandfather over my childhood bed, staring.
I´m not sure why I woke, or how long he stood there, silent,
or even why I didn´t say anything to him, or call out
down the hall where the phantom glow of the t.v. flickered.
I was a grown man with my own child before I ever confessed
this, my first real fear, my first connection to another world,
to my father. When I did he looked away, nodded
then sighed and nothing more was said. We sat on the back porch,
late August, and watched a meteor shower. We understood
the how´s and why´s of each falling star, the theories behind
interplanetary bodies, but we preferred the mystery,
the old wives´ tale of how each represented a death.
One of us, I don´t remember which, lit a candle. Then I slept
under that sky, and when I woke it was morning and the world,
so bright and clear, was beyond my knowing.
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