Neighborhood Ghosts
There used to be farmland at the top of Kellogg Street,
open rolling fields and nickel mines along the creek.
A black and white shimmer of cows still grazes the backyard lawns
their smell rising up to greet you every time it rains.
The woods were waist high once,
the hint of a former Christmas tree farm
just visible if you squint and blur your eyes.
You might also see ghosts
walking through the houses there
as if they'd never been built
or living in them over people's heads
like Northern Spy apples
bright in the whiteout of winter,
floating once in awhile through the rooftops
to mailboxes in the trees.
Little Margaret still owned the gray house
that crouched in the water tower's shadow
like a timid bird
when we moved next door.
Nocturnal Margaret, living rural
without an indoor toilet or phone,
walking into the village once a week
in a ratty old fur collared coat,
or chasing her sister away with a broomstick
whenever she came to deliver groceries.
We shook our heads when we heard
that Margaret hit her husband too,
when they argued so loud
that everyone up and down the street could hear them.
She may even have, in a fit of fury, killed him.
He was dead for who knows how many days
when Elmer Ford, who'd built their little house
and ours and the one next door
and planted all the woods,
came quick at Margaret's urging
and found him lying blue on the couch.
Margaret kept his blue sedan around for years,
sitting in that meadow of a yard.
Said it was for protection
when robbers come sizing things up.
Neighbors stood beneath their nylon flags,
in front of cheerful window boxes
joking about how she must be living on sweet pears
from that big old tree in the back,
sleeping all day and talking to herself all night
in the curved palm of the honeysuckle left from the farm.
I remember peering through the white of bitter winter
at policeman scaling her front porch
sure she'd frozen to death or starved when she,
hard of hearing, didn't come to answer their morning knock.
And hearing how they just stood there as she pummeled them
in a fit of fright when she woke to see them tilting over the bed.
Of course it wasn't death that took her away when she went.
It was social services taking her to a group home in the city,
where she'd get three squares a day and lots and lots of heat.
A lawyer auctioned off the house and a young couple had it pulled down
so they could build a nicer one in its place with the driest basement in Clinton.
This left several animals homeless and caused a raccoon to try to tear its way
through our roof until we foiled it with the aid of metal flashing
and the ruckus we raised several nights in a row.
It also made our basement that much wetter.
Little Margaret had been transformed
into something atmospheric that stings your eyes
or enters you on each breath when you weed the garden,
like an old apple tree that'd stopped producing
and burns a little bit smoky.
We carried on,
went about our business
seldom paying her or the rest of our replaced
any more mind than we did
the Milkweed, Chicory, Queen Anne's Lace
that grace the borders of summer.
Most days she keeps to herself,
shaking her head as we mow our lawns too short
or yank old bushes out by the roots.
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