Michael Hettich

The Ghost

Reading in the garden, I thought I heard someone 
singing in the distance, and though I suspected
I was intruding on something deeply private, 
I quieted myself to listen, as though 
I might sing with this stranger. 

The tune was unfamiliar, so I listened more intently 
as she walked out of earshot; then I listened to the breezes 
and the light. As a boy I loved to walk home 
through the city at dusk as the streetlights came on, 

I loved to look into the lit-up rooms 
of the houses I passed, to imagine the lives there, 
which seemed more present, somehow, than my own. 

And when I reached home, I lingered outside, 
watching my family move and talk
to each other as though they were strangers to me, 
these people who were usually so familiar 
I could hardly see them. I yearned for some sense 

of who I was too as I watched my own absence, 
soon to be filled, when I walked through the door 
as myself, whoever that was then, and disappeared 
again into someone I can’t remember now.

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