Ghost Girl

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by Amy Gerstler


  HYMN TO THE NECK

  Tamed by starched collars or looped by the noose, all hail the stem that holds up the frail cranial buttercup. The neck throbs with dread of the guillotine’s kiss, while the silly, bracelet-craving wrists chafe in their handcuffs. Your one and only neck, home to glottis, tonsils, and many other highly specialized pieces of meat, is covered with stubble. Three mornings ago, undeserving sinner though she is, yours truly got to watch you shave in the bath. Soap matted your chest hair. A clouded hand mirror reflected a piece of your cheek. Vapor rose all around like spirit-infested mist in some fabled rainforest. The throat is a road. Speech is its pilgrim. Something pulses visibly in your neck as the words hand me a towel flower from your mouth.

  IN THE ASPIRIN ORCHARD

  O analgesia trees! How your powdery

  fruit soothes. Ancient tasting tablets

  chalky as fossils dissolve on our tongues,

  tame our pains. Wearing relief’s

  crown of flowers, sex re-enters

  the room, uninvited, shy—

  disguised as religion, robed in blessed

  caresses that address every last malady.

  Reckoned rightly, all suffices.

  Misgivings licked clean, I abandoned

  my love under a budding aspirin tree.

  He was singing the chorus

  of Let’s Pretend it’s Snowing.

  He had a sleeping disease,

  and often nodded off while

  I was talking. Our treasure’s

  buried in clay pots where I first

  nursed tender aspirin saplings

  into bloom. I haven’t the heart

  to dig it up. Years have passed.

  Our orchard prospered and spread.

  Now hired pickers fill linen

  aprons with harvests of dusty pills.

  Like crumbs of asteroid

  or hailstones, clusters

  of ripening aspirins hang,

  tiny alluring lanterns,

  blurrily aglow. The merest sight

  of them palely burns aches away.

  Darling, do I hear the whining

  of distant violins?

  Let us kneel, for the age

  of fevers is upon us.

  Notes on the Poems

  “Touring the Doll Hospital” has some lines collaged into it from Walt Whitman’s letters written while he was nursing wounded soldiers during the Civil War. The quotes appear in quotation marks in the poem. Two images at the end of the poem are also drawn from those letters, in which Whitman says of one injured soldier, “I do what I can for him . . . sit near him for hours if he wishes it,” and of another, “He expressed a great desire for good strong tea.”

  In “Witch Songs,” the line “They’re all witches under the skin” is a slightly altered version of a line Bugs Bunny says at the end of a cartoon.

  In “Listen, Listen, Listen” the line “At the sound of your voice/heaven opens its portals to me” is from a Rogers and Hart song. That poem contains three or four reworked lines from The Human Voice: A Concise Manual on Training the Speaking and Singing Voice by Franklin D. Lawson, Harper & Bros., 1944.

  “The New Dog” contains some lines and language, in slightly altered form, from the Old Testament, Proverbs 1:23 and 1:27.

  “In the Aspirin Orchard” contains an inversion of the poet Christina Rossetti’s line: “all suffices reckoned rightly.”

  About the Author

  Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction, and journalism who lives in Los Angeles. Her previous eleven books include Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, and her journalism and art criticism have appeared in Artforum, The Village Voice, Los Angeles Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Art and Antiques, and numerous other publications. She teaches in the graduate fine arts department at Art Center, College of Design, in Pasadena, California, and is a member of the core faculty of the Master’s program in critical writing there. She is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program at Bennington College in Vermont, and has taught writing and/or art at the California Institute of the Arts, Cal Tech, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Southern California, and elsewhere.

  PENGUIN POETS

  TED BERRIGAN

  Selected Poems

  The Sonnets

  PHILIP BOOTH

  Lifelines

  JIM CARROLL

  Fear of Dreaming

  Void of Course

  BARBARA CULLY

  Desire Reclining

  CARL DENNIS

  New and Selected Poems

  1974-2004

  Practical Gods

  DIANE DI PRIMA

  Loba

  STUART DISCHELL

  Dig Safe

  STEPHEN DOBYNS

  Pallbearers Envying the

  One Who Rides

  The Porcupine’s Kisses

  ROGER FANNING

  Homesick

  AMY GERSTLER

  Crown of Weeds

  Ghost Girl

  Medicine

  Nerve Storm

  DEBORA GREGER

  Desert Fathers, Uranium

  Daughters

  God

  ROBERT HUNTER

  Sentinel

  BARBARA JORDAN

  Trace Elements

  MARY KARR

  Viper Rum

  JACK KEROUAC

  Book of Blues

  Book of Haikus

  JOANNE KYGER

  As Ever

  ANN LAUTERBACH

  If in Time

  On a Stair

  PHYLLIS LEVIN

  Mercury

  WILLIAM LOGAN

  Macbeth in Venice

  Night Battle

  Vain Empires

  DEREK MAHON

  Selected Poems

  MICHAEL MCCLURE

  Huge Dreams: San

  Francisco and Beat

  Poems

  CAROL MUSKE

  An Octave Above Thunder

  ALICE NOTLEY

  The Descent of Alette

  Disobedience

  Mysteries of Small Houses

  LAWRENCE RAAB

  The Probable World

  Visible Signs

  STEPHANIE STRICKLAND V

  ANNE WALDMAN

  Kill or Cure

  Marriage: A Sentence

  PHILIP WHALEN

  Overtime: Selected Poems

  ROBERT WRIGLEY

  Lives of the Animals

  Reign of Snakes

  JOHN YAU

  Borrowed Love Poems

 

 

 


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