Dispatch

Draw near good ghost,
   extend your hands
slow as stars
   —secret, vast—
give said dance
   when the present
tense in me
   is a dark sky,
when the oceans
   fall from our shoulders
like horizons.
   This is a dream, this
is a car parked
   in the middle
of the night, this,
   this is the song:

and the sky
   is hazy shade
of winter. Good ghost,
   are we still
on the hood of that wreck?
   Denied our face,
our diffuse grace,
   the sun, its glare.
There, in desert air;
   or here, on a specific
shore; or now, in the
   prophetic city
where morning
   breaks upon the lake,
upon the glass
   upon the stone and brick
of this song. Good ghost,
   begin your dance.

Carl Marcum was born in Nogales, Arizona, and raised in Tucson. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona and has been the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His first collection of poems, Cue Lazarus, was published in 2001; a second collection, “Constellation,” is nearing completion. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at DePaul University in Chicago.