Beetlebung and Kettlehole--April Poems

Out of This World

In the bed and breakfast, at Monticello,
where they say folks without forms
glide down into guests’ rooms
on the orders of great Duke Costello
where things tune out of time,
and the earth is but a stone
with clouds electrified and
lights go out at the faintest intercept,
and present entangles with the past.

While my room is still and armoire lifeless,
night-table holds coins, keys, pearl earrings
and window’s open, and an abalone moon
casts glances at hazy kudzu on oak branches.

Not to last but for a few brief seconds,
love comes to me
from an unexplored territory
with Duke Costello, his long hair in curls,
a high-waisted silhouette in breeches
who scoops up my icy depths with a bow
then vanishes shimmering into a universe
boundless and multiform.

Such grandeur, such nobility,
only without a body or limbs.
He is not my ephemeral invention
for his essence is free from
the defective clock of time,
which goes berserk with a secret or two,
and I, too, with a tangled verse
wish to slip, longing, into his solitude.

Now, you tell me, how else
could I interpret this vision
when the soft mattress under me creaked
in the bed and breakfast, at Monticello,
where they say folks without forms
glide down into guests’ rooms?


Note: My husband and I stayed for two weeks in 2009 in a haunted bed and breakfast in Monticello, Florida, not to mix up with Monticello, Virginia. Although I didn’t see or hear anything, I always felt the seclusion and the stillness of the place. I thought about that place, John Denham House, while having fun with this prompt.

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Prompt: ghost, ghostly