Ghost Story

We know the occupants. They tell us a true ghost
in this world is lost, and any living in your house
should be counseled out. But those of the everyday,
the spook glimpsed in the coffee pot, the book
opening its pages to what you were thinking
by itself, the leaf shadows becoming rats on the lawn
of the Rhode Island Historical Society, pets switching
from one life to another after an owner’s exit, or reverse,
are this world’s, and cherished, just as the apples are not
dead but seem so, falling and rotting and suffering wasps
in their abdomens striped with night and a sunny day,
and carry the idea, or promise of life in death, the way
we might replace words with an almost natural equivalent,
permission for persimmon, for instance.