Day: August 13, 2023

ghostsghosts

mary when i saw you and lisa in the
building today by the jewelry shop i
didn’t recognize you at first i was
waiting for lisa to introduce me to
her friend turning to you i saw that it was
you for a moment i thought you were about
to hug me or maybe for a moment i
thought you were a dream come true i could easily
fall for you were we twenty years younger and
were you not married but it wouldn’t be you i
fell for you remind me awfully much of
someone i did fall for when i was twenty
years younger the music of your voice your laugh
the line of your smile the very expressions
you sometimes carry on your face and your
very face yourself you
may as well be her
you could be her ghost come back to life she was
a long time ago in a time that didn’t
have what i would call a happy outcome

today trying to be witty i was
inept instead asking you what you were
doing in my part of town it wasn’t you that
i was trying to push away hard by the
jewelry shop hard to get to the ages we
have got to without ghosts dogging our heels
pestering us getting in the way

(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)

driving at duskdriving at dusk

my father loved the deer of colorado’s western slope.
he drove carefully at dusk along the rural two-lane blacktop, counting those he saw— doe, buck and fawn—one hundred seventy-five one evening, by his count.
he’d fought in korea and vietnam, killed strangers and had his young friends
die beside him.
he loved the deer for being alive and free,
allowing him to tend to them by driving carefully at dusk.

(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)

“Fiction ultimately is the art form of human yearning, and that is essential to the work of fictional narrative art. A character who yearns is not the same as a character who simply has problems. A lot of characters have problems, but the problems have not yet resolved themselves into the dynamics of yearning for this writer and this character. That yearning is at the heart of all temporal art forms.” – Robert Olen Butler (interviewed by Heather Iarusso in Close-up: Characterization)