from “After”
*
Doorframes in wind
The blood’s radiant
Green flower
And scarves tangling
Among all the blond
Grasses one
Chickadee gathered the day
Into smallness
The dunes and the dunes
And the water
*
What name was I each
House in a
Street of houses my
Hands in the trees
For bells
I promise to what
Purpose was
My story the
Ripple of snake
Skins or sounds long
In the curtains
My father died suddenly in March of 2010. During the following months of profound mourning, poetry gave me no answer. I didn’t write a single word. I was surprised, then, when in October I wrote eleven poems in two days in a new voice, before realizing that this was the consciousness of a ghost—or not a ghost, exactly, as there is no word for this. It did, however, feel like a possession, so I wrote these poems nearly every day, without doing any other kind of writing, until I had finished 67 pieces. I had no previous interest in ghosts—I was certainly not a ghost chaser—so this felt like poetry’s authentic response to my father’s death which had otherwise eluded me. This after-eye was haunted by the living. It couldn’t remember its life, was neither male nor female, but felt a tremendous love and yearning for living things. I decided to call the project “After” in order to avoid all the preconceived notions of “ghost” and its often cliché literary tradition. The process was powerful for me, though I don’t know if it will bear interest with readers.
Chad Sweeney is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010) and the Spanish/English bilingual Wolf Milk: Lost Poems of Juan Sweeney, forthcoming from Forklift Books. Two books of his translations are forthcoming, Selected Poems of H.E. Sayeh (White Pine Press, from the Persian), and Pablo Neruda’s final book, Nixonicidio (Marick Press). Chad is coeditor of Parthenon West Review. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Writers Almanac, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Verse, Volt, and elsewhere. Chad is an assistant professor in the new MFA program at California State University, San Bernardino.