Ghosts

A hallway full of shadeless lamps suddenly goes dark
Upon the simultaneous bursting of the globes.
Glass is everywhere, and so thin it forgets

To reflect even the tiny glimmer of your
Matchlight as you pull out your wish 
Cigarette. 

This is it. The immediacy of the final desire.

I know the dead I know where ghosts go
to feel at home in the float

And how they commune with the living
through the lightswitch 
or the smells of honeysuckles off 
the highway upstate
I say

But you don’t

Copyright © 2022 by Dana Jaye Cadman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 24, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“When I was little, I asked my dad where the dead go and he said, ‘I don’t know,’ until finally he went ‘Okay, I think you become energy,’ and I was like, ‘Like light?’ I think I thought about that a lot. Ghosts in every lighter and lamp. But, until I write a poem, I don’t know exactly what the thought is, or what the yearning is. It comes and then reveals myself to me. The poem finds a memory and turns all its hazy possibility into being, all the missing, and the not knowing and asking and getting confused.”
—Dana Jaye Cadman