The tin top cottages
should be haunted – but there is no ghost –
no made-pail Hoogstraten –
A man ripped the roof
off his own propped home and so next door
was left for him – alone –
Now stand those twins
with no tiles or grace – rotting near Hoogstraten –
and his resting place
This bar’s serving hatch is always left agape –
tonight I see it is a varnished picture frame
holding unfair perspectives of the pirouettes
of the not-Degas barmaids in uniform black
In this pub’s cellar are floating phantasma –
I am often told – here under my pint-fixed feet –
below the boards – Orbital corner-of-the-eye
lights are known to cross the cold stones
They are – the old boys also claim –
fixed by the presence of the town’s tunnels –
those mislaid smugglers’ rat runs now
bricked up within the dead-end arches
Other spectres are regulars in the saloon –
they bother the rushed staff and punters
from their precarious stools – a feat in old age –
added up they would predate electricity –
and then they shuffle off – with chains of change –
shifting between the bogs and their tall thrones –
always back on their seat to summon spirits –
from the optics – but not with their pensions
They say that there is a ghost
in every old house
That frigorific forms will rise
to meet with warm blood
and damp bones
an attraction
almost a magnetism
It is beyond any control
Love is a heavy haunting
which we meet unexpectedly
in bars and dark bedrooms
The ghost I knew was cold
which I did not tell the kids
She troubled the shadows
of our chattering family home
Late in the night I would run
three flights of stairs
Yes
me
the adult
fucking scared
My father died
aged fifty-five,
I was aged
twenty-three,
he slipped away
at St. Peter’s:
My mourned dusk
then came back,
as I was buried
in the haunted dark,
under the canopy
in Buxted Park,
back to his story,
as we three ducked
through the woods
on St Anne’s Hill,
our fears fostered
by his ghost story.
