“Cinema plus psychoanalysis equals the science of ghosts.”
—Jacques Derrida

“Ghosts are not evil things to be feared or fought, they are suffering souls seeking their path.”
—from The Eye 2 (見鬼2), directed by the Pang Brothers

Because she wore a bone slip to sleep
a horde of sheep slipped into her,
a mischief of mice, a gale of ghosts.
Because she rooted around for a winding way
she followed the path of pins.

Because of a summer squall
her house of wind fell                   into disrepair
with revenant gangs cracking her battered abode, up her fluting waterpipes
and windpipes, into the network of bowing drafts that bob
in her walls,
thirteen ghosts plaited through cornrowed hair
causing a massive crown of clouds
to wear trumpeted air resounding the celestial field.

*

Because she’s chained
to the shame of her amphibian under-self       and its ancient amphitheater,
bubble-faced frogs float
over a low-lying lake she takes
a dip in when dreaming;
her tree-toad skin
sipping evanescent ghosts
joined to fog through the flick
of those sticky tongues
and air chirrups into her internal streams—
rivers within by the tympanum.

*

During some dawns
—when ghosts dress up the sky with violet light—
she leans into a membrane slippage buried in a shell of a ship that sinks
through deep-sea sediment.

She stretches her slender legs, oils her hair, and scrubs bones and robes
of ghosts that metamorphose into singing fossils,
washed away by breezes that inhale
a composite neo-ghost polliwog
born of fractal spiraling krill,
secreted in her depth, in a deserted ghost
ship stored in the ocean’s mass; a Mass for her
dead parts sweep the deep with its weeping dust,
and crustaceans at the ocean’s lip-sticked crooked smile
linger: husks of her ghost whisperer’s pentimento lisp.
 

(Image: Francesca Woodman’s House #3 (c. 1975–1976))