A Box of Ghosts

Shall we break bread with them, make our communion

With these who smile at us from scraps of film-?

Motions of life, but this, this is not life:

Quick sprigs of garden, garish greens of summer

Where plastic balls are thrown, fat orange cats

Dawdle across the purr of the projector,

Grandfathers poke sticks into blurred hedges . . .

We run the years and colours out, to find them

Slipping their generations into albums,

Holding us to their breasts, our swaddling-clothes

Dull ivory on muted furs and sables.

How we illuminate these books of hours,

These long autumnal gatherings, pressed leaves,

These paper hands condemned to fondle us.

Cassette and tape expound their resurrection,

Come from the grave to say how roofs need mending,

How well we look, how tiring their long journey.

We know those coughs, that cast of amateurs

Who say the one thing that they still can say,

Who speak their lines, then go to bed at noon,

Choked on a dust that has become habitual.

Ours, ours. The patina of flesh and bone

Dwindles to pasteboard: burnished gold and sepia

Flourished with whiskers, a pale balustrade,

And some slight tripod crowned with leaves and brass.

They have become such studious lay figures

That all their talk is but of how light lay

Upon the crease of silks, or buttoned tunics,

Though once they heard, and cannot now recall,

Such press of echoes, such a to and fro

From the bright years whose darkness now enfolds them:

The bat-squeaks from some huge, enormous horn

Flowering carnivorously in a drawing-room,

The mordant romance of a violin.

Their rest is silence. We respect and fear it.

And all dissolves into impossibles.

We are such natives of a promised land

As those, hemmed in by sullen seas and mountains,

Who, when the white prospectors came for gold,

Heard from their wind-up toy, their box of ghosts,

Strange, unappeasable, ancestral voices;

Danced with the singing dead, made their communion.