Ghosts in the Acres We've Already Harvested

We have a haunted place, ghost-traveled, a field of bleeding roots, the heavy footprints sunk deep, marking some headless and inconsiderate deceit or abandon or violence.  Something we can't even speak about.

Sometimes I feel myself there huddled against the dark winds that threaten to exhale the topsoil like angered smoke.  Don't say it.  Lie still.

The sounds of past keening surface from the covered well north of the field.  The secret words rise to the surface like a killing oil, dark rainbows of some future healing that has yet to be spoken about, the eight pennies we threw down that, when fished to the top, would reflect the story of "how I made it through."  Wishing and throwing.  Wishing and throwing.

They're setting fire to the corn fields, and you're driving me home.

Angel.  Siren.  Love.

And then.

And then.


That's the secret place, isn't it?  That's the place we meet the ghost army, the tortured, diaphanous rows of "how we were hurt" and how we simply walked away from the war.


I'm in my truck driving this row and she's singing:  Just you wait and see:  someone will come to help you. 


Listen.  We have all held the hurting seed, burst-shy and cautious.  We have held the penny wishes.  We must be gentle with each other: broken-winged, song-bound, copper-colored birdflowers.


Take me to a place where the specter retreats clutching its only possession in a greedy-lidded mason jar : You must fear being loved.


Let it out and move on.


Reach the determined, sun-strengthened arm down to the depth of wells and oil and rich soil:  two times the measure of our sorrow because this is the length of our joy, and I will not let go, riding the green shoot all the way to the full mouth of a new harvest.  Let it speak the gift through the ghost, a light that reveals everything.  I'm not afraid of this.