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** The Weight of Ghosts *
         ————————
We do not truly realize how
Our lives are so crowded, thick
With spirits and messages.
We are as yet untuned to know.  So,
We need to sense the fully living
Within from those motioning without
Around about and collect them thus
Into the backpacks of memory
To be the folktales we’ll share
In the telling later, as we circling
Sit around the campfire’s flames
Flickering sparks of security 
To crack the sealing dark night.

Note how it happens unexpectedly:
When, maybe every other month
Has skated by, and only
Then it is realized an instant
After the fact…That, caught
By the corners of eyesight,
“Oh my!  I have just seen, it
Seems, a ghost strolling by!”
Too, (you may smile) those
Sights have almost always been
The paced gray wisps
Of one or the other of 
A beloved dog or cat that’s come
From their vast park-land,
Their rolling,green, grassy
Freedom t’other side
O’ The Bridge,
O’ playing chase on high,
During which, perchance, as my
Intuition senses, the event
Of their “visiting” here,
Occurs (to them also with some
Surprise) as if there were some
Unexpected trapdoor-wormholes of
Passage between heaven and here…

Too, as today, there are the times
When ghosts may be coming in my
Glimpses of more
Than forms sculpted of white dust,
Just as it seemed for me, an hour ago
While eating my breakfast toast. 
Here on my being-bedridden hospital bed,
With our pups lying set-ready, begging
Beside my feet, I was taken 
From my minute of enjoyable eating 
By a slight sensation of a lowering 
Of the bed’s adjustable head.
Had its aging mechanism taken 
A belated final fall?  Hmm…
But, then, twisting around,
I thought I gauged a slight pushing
Down of the sheets on the other side
Of my pillow, causing me 
To ponder, “What other presence
Comes, it seems mindlessly, 
Poised begging a taste of toast?”
Plus…without the misty, lacy form:
Unseen,  however, it must be
Bearing Weight
On my bed, by me! — as, similarly,
Twice in my life before,
When I had felt — a touching —
A tapping on my shoulder, so
That I’d turned to see if
Anyone were there — although
It would seem to be not
A question of a Who, but a What?
Those presences not glanced, but felt.
Not a question of vision, 
But of touch, of weight.
Not of light, but of gravity.

Without conclusions, the unfor-
Getable instances that I keep
With a wondering smile —
Of how it can be ever or more
That some ghosts might be seen
And others would 
Crinkle the sheets as they stop by?

———————————————————————————————
(c) sally young Eslinger 12/15/21
(Written for Campbell Welch)
Thank, Charlie
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