Haunted Houses

Junior Johnson mocked and Fu Bigonzi dared me,

Waiting at the gate-end of the weedy walk

For me to prove they lied. So at each further step

Through burrs and reeking goldenrod, retreat became

Unlikelier. I climbed the trellis up the porch

Pretending it was any trellis, any porch,

And snaked across the peeling shingles to the window

Where one board was split. I pulled that board ajar

And leaning upward, pried the window open. Then,

With a clear way awaiting me, the slanting sun

Throbbed on the porch roof heat that pulsed as my

head pulsed.

I turned, to turn back down the tindery splintered

shingles,

Shimmy down the raingutter and fall in a shower

Of rust on blistered hands to the crushed cool grass

-Taunted a quitter?-Iron-breath'd, I climbed in

One leg, both legs, dropped then into the murky coolness

On the landing of the stairs: Below, in half-light

Needles of light, their eyes knotholes in the boarded

windows,

Sewed light-seams slantwise toward the shadowed floor.

I gripped the bannister, dislodged a shower of dust

That fell and rose and swirled along the five sunbeams.

I took a slow step down. A mahogony table still

Held two majolica paperweights upon a pile

Of letters someone had received and had not answered.

A look of life half-lived, a table setting still

Awaiting two, two chairs by the ashen log on the firedogs.

Two glasses on the sideboard next the staircase stood,

A dust-stoppered decanter by them, dust and dead

Flies in the glasses. Who had lived together here

Beneath a mica shade where wrought-iron Nina, Pinta,

And Santa Maria sail their circles round and round

An unlit globe of glass on dark and dusty seas?

Who left and never have returned to claim their own?

Why don't they come to claim their own,

DANIEL HOFFMAN

To live companionable lives out at this hearth

For two, table for two, decanter set for two

-Or do they still move here among these mouse-gnawed

letters,

Caress familiar furniture with touch that can't

Dislodge one grain of dust in the half-light? As I turned

At the bottom of the stair some silent thing turned

toward me,

Raised its arms and shrieked my shriek-pure terror

Slit its frogwhite face with voice I knew and know.

No doubt that bulging china closet's glass bow front

Had caught grotesque reflections from these stairs before-

But I was skinning down the rainspout when that thought

Found chink to clutch to in the riptide of my fear.

Yet I'd been, and not on dares, in eerier houses

Where one among one of a pair of candelbra,

Six of a dozen goblets, half a set of silver

Kept house where every swelling spoon's a mantic mirror

That makes her huge who sits to table, makes the empty

Facing chair a thin vein 'round the mirror's eyelid;

And another where another's half-dozen of a dozen

Knives, forks, spoons, six of twelve matched goblets

And half a pair of candelabra makes a setting

For a half-life where the absent ghost exacts

A compound interest from this capital, as he

-Inmate of a present no reflection ends-

Exacts like interest whose own penury's the same.

There's an oval glass in either's hallway. I have seen

My hand on the knobs before those mirrors and behind,

Almost proof, you'd think, henceforth against all haunting.