Good Ghostmanship

for John Prine

”It’s as though you really had

secrets. One secret. That you go in there

on the assumption the other guy

is the one who’s going to get it

And you find out,

you did. You look

at yourself in the mirror

The mirror

is a civil war”

— Charles Olson

A CAVEAT: This poem is both based on and inspired by a true dream

of desperate, then watershed, inadequacy. I botched a ph.d. in physics that I had spent my life thinking was wanted of a ‘me’ who in no other way could be pleasing or useful. I took a stab at one ph.d. exam question, knew it was beyond my right-brain capabilities, and handed in a blank test book to the proctor. “You finished earlier than anyone else,” he remarked. “You sure you answered every question?” To make it known I was finished, I grabbed the blue book off his desk, threw it in a waste basket, and left the room.

Once outside in a very long hall (haul?), I felt a kind of hairshirt relief, known to those who tread the path of negation, or, at its best, the road of relinquishment. Cross roads are often empty-feeling places totally devoid of choice.

If so, the dream might have been a victory of renunciation. There was a certainty in not knowing what to do or even where to go next. I felt like any such “career choice” had to be a…