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 MagazinePoetry Review, and The Sun

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