John LaMar Cole

Poetry

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ghost story 

 

I’ve seen but one ghost

not the scary kind

though startling nonetheless

standing atop the stairs

glowing in the dark

as if spritzed with radium

like those poor young women

stenciling numbers

on the faces of wristwatches

holding camelhair brushes

between their dainty iridescent teeth

blowing kisses over the enamel 

to dry the deadly paint

then dying like clockwork

in the nascent tradition

of madame curie

albeit bereft her celebrity

still lethally radiant 

in her lead-lined sarcophagus 

 

And so she shone, my paternal grandmother

as if lit from within

frosted glass fired by cold blue flame 

shimmering moonlight

on a cloudless night

indoors 

 

she was not my favorite, no

not the one who spoke with the dead

during table-turning séances

spirits rocking and rapping 

sepulchral morse code

not her

but instead the one who didn’t like me at all

who thought me a bona fide bastard

despite my staring back at her 

with her own blackfoot mother’s defiant face

 

that one, who chased me around

with a freshly cut maple switch 

when I sassed her

proclaiming her unsolicited handiwork 

unspeakable ugliness

the jaw-dropping audacity

slathering our trees with lead paint

high as she could reach

mortified imagining monday’s schoolbus

our front yard a forest

of ghastly whitewashed

white trash trees

 

one would have thought my spectral visitor

would have been the sweet grandmother

the one who warbled vaudeville songs

with the lilting treble of a field sparrow

who tucked me in bed with kisses

who could read your fortune

using only an ordinary deck of cards

the one whose eyes were sparkling orbs

where something lively flickered within

 

the kind one

 

no, not her, but the heavy one 

cumbrous, phlegmatic, laconic

uneasy amazon in her faded cotton dress

lumbering forward with an old man’s gait

a living anachronism 

as if plowed up from the field

among other inscrutable indigenous artifacts

a head of easter island 

come to life, born of the soil itself

the toilworn farm matron

with her callused farmhand hands

that could twist the necks of chickens

with the blithe practiced ease

of wringing out a washcloth

laughing all the while

at their comic death throes

writing their bloody signatures

on the dirt path they busied

in headless longhand

 

the ghost grandmother

was the one who harvested my mother’s gladiolas

heaping them on graves

of long dead loved ones only she remembered 

if even she

while my loved one—my mother

wept in her bedroom over the heartless ruination 

of her devoted vernal attentions 

to soil and seedlings and bulbs

the presumptuous matriarchal right to theft

my father mute

so acclimated to his life

of second-son serfdom

and the sickly one at that

(not the dead war hero)

 

it was she

on that thanksgiving eve

in her faded cotton dress

with the tiny blue flowers

arms folded

smiling the sweetest smile

I’d ever seen her make 

—never’d seen her make—

I was twelve 

 

I fell backwards down the stairs 

 

no one accused me of lying

and I wasn’t

more likely a hallucination

a symptom of neuropathology perhaps

due to systematic inculcation

but not deceit

for we were a house of ghosts

spiritualists who called themselves baptists

never far from encounters with the other world

making for the creepiest of bedtimes

any young boy could imagine

I was predisposed to see them 

but why her?

why the one who hated me?

and why was she smiling?

 

my father slept in my bed with me that night

something he had never done before

waiting for his mother’s return as much as 

to console me from night terrors

 

what I did not know

was that my older brother

already a grown man on his second marriage

saw her too two nights before

having awakened from a nightmare

of sinister sentient cars

prowling the lawn like beasts of prey 

then opening his eyes in a sweat

there she sat, at the foot of his bed

smiling

and then she rose and left the room

 

my father knew this but hadn’t told me

 

I predicted her death as well

months earlier a radiant spring morning

telling my mother my prescient dream

where the dead reached out to me

like hands pushing through wet bedlinen

but somehow could not touch me

someone is going to die, I said

and mother laughed in a nervous way

her strange morbid overly imaginative son

 

but a few minutes later 

we got the phone call

the sound of my father

sobbing in the living room

mother and I sitting on her bed

staring into one another

knowingly 

 

she'd been found dead that morning

 

one would think the ghost would have been 

the grandmother who loved me

who gave me her ‘walking’ table before she left

the one my grandfather made for her

a little mahogany three-legged tilt-top

dainty yet sturdy just as she

the dead speak to you, she told me

she far outlived the other

passing in her nineties

but I never felt her oncoming death 

and she never came back to me

after she was 

 

I’d stopped believing in ghosts by then

and they’d stopped confiding in me

their earthly messenger

 

I sleep better without them.

 

Crow

 

O Eater of Death

how regal thy deportment

beak skewering offal like cocktail olives

dining on the caviar of carrion

picking clean the roadkill harvest

with a dignity unknown 

to ravenous men. 

 

You, your head cocked

nimbly astride highway slaughter

attuned to the music

of asphalt and powerline

equally at home in cornfield and cadaver

patient, methodical

waiting your turn 

with every passing vehicle.

 

Slaked and sated

with a veronica of mortuary plumage

you abandon the ivory ossature xylophone

for raindrops and uniroyals to play

each in their manner

that the umbrous soil may claim its due. 

 

Adept at arithmetic and problem solving

you mimic eerily the voice of men

a hollow baritone ocarina

as if from some medium’s spirit trumpet

dancing on the séance tabletop

where otherworldly contact has been made

and the dead waft palpably among us.

 

O scavenger of squandered souls

could you but pluck from my heart

the rotting musculature of gangrenous grief

abscond aloft on shimmering obsidian wings

then hide it in your special sanctuary

an oubliette within your solitary ken

You, noble acquisitor of trinkets and trash,

that I should sense its verminous progeny

writhe within me

nevermore. 

 

bottle tree

 

bottles glinting, tinkling—

wind chime of captured souls 

strummed by paltry summer breeze

—dangle among a paucity of leaves

spindly crapemyrtle nodding exhausted 

more from material than spiritual burden

the tintinnabulation of tinted glass

clinking vessels of hostless toasts

heartily congratulate themselves 

on postmortem arboreal congregation 

their xylophonic counterpoint 

audible from the gravel road 

 

cobalt blue the favored hue

to lure unwelcome disembodied visitors

glass jars sheathing leafless limbs 

like telegraph insulators of yore

mouths pointing trunkward 

trapping evil spirits inside

their baleful wails rending the night wind

vanquished like vampires

beneath the cleansing rays of dawn

—but not so here

 

this tree was for those loved

by the local wiccan black irish gypsy

ageless as she was ancient

holed up in her clapboard floodplain shanty

these bottles were of many colors

dangling christmas ornaments

adorning the scrawny myrtle’s branches

in the thick wilting august swelter—

many contained a pinch of grave dirt

others a lock of hair, a favored trinket 

makeshift canopic urns 

whose quondam utility safeguarded

perfume, whisky, canola oil, milk of magnesia

emptied of their erstwhile contents

they assumed loftier charges

housing souls of the dead

—or so it’s said

 

but when the river witch died

there was no one left 

to choose her special spectral receptacle

nor shelter it within the tremulous embrace

of her bejeweled spinster myrtle—

they bulldozed her shanty

chopped down her tree

and all her well-tended tethered souls

were hauled off to the landfill

reduced to shards among common refuse

an ignominious backhoe burial

beneath poisoned prayerless turf

where even the earth has lost her face

the place entire lives are taken

to be obliterated from memory 

and rot into nothingness

—in perpetuity.

 

the recital

 

her arm lay upon the edge of the casket

as if upon the closed lid of a grand piano

back facing her rapt captive audience

holding their breath to not miss a word

(she’d warmed up backstage to favorable reviews)

now center stage

backdrops of mums & gladiolas 

a spray of roses laid close at hand

in which to toy her twisting fingers

she intoned her improv lacrimosa 

in a gravelly whiskeyed stage whisper

giving way to a moving lyric vocalise 

before launching into keening flights of fioriture

that swept the chambers like bat wings

 

it was as if her entire life had led 

to this singular iconic moment

her swansong operatic debut

(audience behind her in this scene)

acutely attuned to the rustle of programs

the clearing of a random throat

the impatient squeaking of folding chairs

against the thickly padded funeralhome carpet 

all signaling that the apex of her dramatic career

had arrived 

 

her accompanist had seen better days

(though not as many as one would hope)

a sallow horowitz in his silk-tufted capsule

the ravages of his final weeks 

mere makeup could not conceal

one nostril flared from a feeding tube

his cheeks cadaverous beneath 

jutting blackfoot zygomatic bones

his customary horn-rim glasses glinting 

above sunken sutured eyelids 

 

but as all good accompanists endeavor

by time-honored tacit accord 

he remained unobtrusively upstage

despite those who’d come 

to see him specifically 

allowing his adored chanteuse

to savor her spotlight a cappella 

until the recital was over

and the whole production

had been moved

to greener pastures.

 

John LaMar Cole grew up on a tobacco farm in the central Bluegrass of Kentucky. John works as a certified medical interpreter while completing his doctoral studies in musical composition & piano performance. A caver of recognition, John’s writing has been published in caving journals & newsletters for over 40 years. John’s poetry has been published in Screen Door Review and Danse Macabre.  

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