Hauntological
By Michael Bazzett
When we went to empty
his apartment after he died
X. commented on the ascetic
(What’s ascetic? asked David.
Monk-like, announced X.
Then why not say monk-like?)
tidiness of the four rooms
invoking the scrubbed wooden
floors of a gallery or bookstore
as a useful comparison.
And then the fifth room, as if
a hoary something had creaked
out of the library stacks and burst
open in reams of loose paper
old books various antiquities
and one yellowed enamel tooth
like a hard seed on the shelf—
all of it dusty and seeming to
move every time we wandered
in or out so that in the end
no one really wanted to go in
there and yet we couldn’t keep
ourselves away from the photos
sheet music philosophical
abstracts clipped articles glossy
magazines bearing covers wed
to a slightly different standard
of beauty allowing David to
ironize and romanticize them
stroking a slow finger over
one dusty cover and its blue
eye-shadowed model until X.
said That’s his skin, that dust
and his finger stopped and we
looked at the dust differently.
We then understood the room
was beneath the metaphoric
and what we stood inside was
the literal house of his memory.
The tooth represents appetite, ventured David.
The tooth is a tooth, said X.
The hardest part of us.
No need for the figurative.
Truth itself sits there on the shelf.
After two hours of pressing
mildewed pamphlets into boxes
the room was even more full
than when we'd begun—spurring
us to ponder how memory can
indeed function like a waterfall
once the initial eddy sluices over
the stone ledge it drags the river
entirely into the cold pool behind it.
Then David lifted an envelope
delicately into the air: To Be Opened
Only Upon The Event of My Passing.
In it was a version of this anecdote,
transcribed. And though the events
preceding the opening of the letter
bore only haphazard resemblance to
what actually transpired in the room,
after it was read aloud by David
in a voice that started out amused
and soon shifted to uneasy monotone
the members of the party could not
shake the hold of the words which
began, as David might say, to inform
their reality so that when the foray
is now recollected in a moment
of tranquility we’re no longer certain
exactly what the hell happened.
Michael Bazzett is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021) and the forthcoming Cloudwatcher, winner of the Stern Prize from APR, (Copper Canyon) due out in the fall of 2025. The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and translation, his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, GRANTA, The Nation, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Review, and The Sun.