(Dear Friends: In 1986, I self-published a 16-poem sequence as a chapbook: The Ghost Behind Your Eyes, based on what Jesus said toward the end of the Gospel of John, specifically the transcendent and, for humanity, potentially transformational 23rd verse of the 17th chapter: “I in them and you in me, may they be perfectly one.” The sequence begins on Good Friday and ends on Easter. Several hundred copies were printed and sold in a handful of Virginia bookstores. I sent one copy to the American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In a handwritten reply, he thanked me for sending him my “very good book.” His kind words humble my soul and lift my spirits to this day. Thirty-nine years later, I re-publish this sequence here for anyone who has discovered the ghost behind their eyes, everyone who is still searching and those who haven’t begun. God’s love and grace to you all, Ken Woodley)
By Ken Woodley
1
BOMBERS TAKE OFF FROM GOLGOTHA
The last shade of something
stalks the rim of night,
barely touching the tops of things,
sniffing the moonlight for food.
The stars are surrounded by burnt tea
and there is drinking.
Darkness walks past the ruins,
spreading like damson
toward the crusty edge.
One by one the constellations are unborn
and the Milky Way seems a beautiful scar.
From the jungle comes the sound of drumming
and the moon is swallowed by clouds
that look like an exploded letter bomb to God.
There are subtle chantings
that seem to be, or not.
People rub their ears
and graze further toward the edge of something.
Some prey is taken
and the night moves one
2
THE RED BALLOON
The red balloon floated away.
It was the one thing wrong with the sky.
That was all.
The red balloon just didn’t seem to fit in
with the white clouds and the blueness
of everything else up there.
“It clashes,” somebody said.
“You don’t see any red clouds, do you?”
Nobody said they had.
The red balloon looked like a drop of blood
in the sky as it floated higher and farther away.
But somebody had held it once.
Somebody had filled it with their own breath,
tied a small knot in it
and secured it with a piece of string.
Then somebody had given it to somebody else.
The red balloon stopped looking like
a drop of blood now.
It looked like somebody’s imagination
and people rubbed their eyes to be sure
they weren’t seeing things.
They weren’t.
When the red balloon was finally swallowed
by the sky
there wasn’t even a ripple.
It was just gone.
“God, I’ve grown up,” somebody said.
That was all.
3
AFTER THE BOMB
The wind exterminates annihilation,
checks its pulse with a dried leaf or two
and climbs a hill behind the barn.
The barbed wire doesn’t stop it.
The cows couldn’t chew it.
The wind plays the sound of crickets eating silence
and there is something else
along the wide black hearth,
tugging back at last syllables,
inventing the new language;
sheep will clothe themselves.
The wind stretches,
yawns and lifts a feather for examination,
blowing it against a sky
which cannot keep it.
The wind blows it north for the summer,
south for the winter,
looking for a season that fits.
The wind blows inside out,
climbs a mountain and falls off.
The hurricane bends everything to its knees.
4
THE CANNIBALS
There are no stars,
no moon,
just hearts beating in the darkness.
Somewhere
twigs snap underfoot.
Wild beasts scream their way
into human silence
and hide among the eaves, waiting.
The armies sit in darkness,
looking for some braille
to tell them this is just
a really black night.
Soldiers smell the enemy coming.
They feel the enemy touching,
the enemy panting,
muscles straining.
The heartbeats quicken
and sound like Morse code,
somebody sending signals
from behind enemy lines.
The arms of the enemy encase them.
The soldiers bite back.
The pain is wet and hot.
Their hearts suddenly sound
like a pantomime.
They taste their own body,
their own blood,
wondering whose skin it is
they’re wearing,
who they used to be.
5
WAR
Summer
is wintered
by teeth
sounding like black heels
crushing ice-covered snow
and a boy looks out the window
for Christmas.
Dinner ends.
A meadow screams “moo”
from the belly of a cow.
6
PEBBLES
The bullets kicking up sand
as they came toward the man
looked like pebbles skipping across a lake.
To skip a pebble across a lake
took the right kind of stone.
The best were like cookies
and you held them with the thumb and forefinger,
throwing with a sidearmed motion,
pretending the pebble was a plane
landing on a runway,
throwing over the lake’s surface,
angling it down slightly.
The man had skipped pebbles once.
Eleven skips was the most he’d ever seen.
7
IN THE CATACOMBS
My hands find the ghosts of wind and water
which haunt the world with their smoothness.
Such soft fossils in the stone,
my fingers feel like they are touching themselves.
I reach for an indentation and find a broken reflection.
I pick up one of my eyes along with some of the ceiling.
They become my nose and a piece of lip.
My hair and a look of pain
stick in my fingers and I hurt and bleed.
I am just as much a grave in this room as I am me.
But I remember opening my eyes for the first time.
Buildings were not broken by the colors.
Neither were the people.
Children ran through fields with their parents
who were also children,
picking flowers which did not burn them.
We spoke sky.
We spoke clouds.
Our accent came from everywhere
and we sang songs which made the elephants dance.
The world grew round and we rolled it to each other.
Nothing growled.
Everything kept growing.
I remember the sound of the first cannons.
It’s mice in the attic, we said, eating cheese.
We’ll get traps when we go to town in the morning.
I remember footprints in the snow.
I remember following.
It seemed like a prayer.
8
WAITING ON THE FALL-OUT
On the edge of everything
I catch a taxi to the harbor
where the boats lay still
and the gulls don’t speak.
Even the pier
holds tightly to its splinters,
giving nothing away
but my own drumbeat steps
as the mist tries me on for size.
I sit along the end of this half bridge
and wait for anything else,
hoping the stars
rule out the total winter.
A ricochet of light
and one has become like us.
There is no splashing,
only ripples
and the echo of my own slow dripping.
I stop remembering now,
only listen to the resonance.
Touch me.
Lose this definition.
9
THE STORM
I listen to my storm.
There are no words anymore,
no voice like winter thunder,
no lightning in my dreams.
It has rained for days
and the only sound is the river
pulling at roots of trees,
erasing the tracks of animals
that came to the bank for food
and the footprints of hunters who followed.
Black birds skate across a stratus pond
and I wonder about things.
The river, tumbling over itself,
sounds like sand being brushed off the sky
and I pray for something to stop this unwinding.
There is a noise.
I look up.
A bird has fallen through the ice
and it begins to rain.
Tomorrow the river may flood.
10
BREATHLESS
I am like a moon.
I am a white lung breathing through the night,
from crescent to full circle,
and then
nothing.
I am a body breathing,
but never enough at once
to never breathe again.
11
SECRET AGENT
I shadow myself
in the long puddles from yesterday’s rain.
Bedouin clouds cross their blue desert;
the city loses its grip and the sand takes over,
seagulls singing as if they are deaf.
I will leave no tracks on this beach.
The wind and tide are my safe house.
I have come all this way to watch waves
defect from the sea.
They look like someone coming over
from the other side,
breaking cover at the last possible moment,
spreading their secrets on this countertop coast.
I cup a foam cipher in my hands
but it soon disappears
and I am left decoding my palms,
my own wrinkles and veins.
12
THE DISTANCE
The distance
is someone else’s
frontyard
where children
play with a dog and a ball
and their parents
sit on the front porch
gazing off into the distance
which is someone else’s
frontyard
where children
play with a dog and a ball
and their parents
sit on the front porch
gazing off into the distance.
13
WINTERS
I walk across a field to where frost
has painted shattered glass on the ground.
Summer must have looked in the mirror,
seen autumn, and the reflection broke.
Even the clown trees cry,
dropping their circus leaves.
Soon the whole world will lie dead,
quiet as cotton, and cold.
There is an attic smell in the air.
I wonder if this is how our own winter
has been born.
Have we forgotten spring?
I kneel now, touching an ice-covered blade.
The frost melts and turns to dew.
My shadow feels the silent barking of the sun.
14
GOD CAME TO BREAKFAST
A star
fell into my cereal
this morning.
It left a hole
in the roof,
splattered milk
in my face,
and just lay
among the cornflakes,
waiting
for my spoon.
15
SURROUNDED
The sentry noticed something peculiar.
He was surrounded.
Something must have crept up on him during the night.
He dropped to his belly
and wriggled around a large boulder
to see what it was.
He waited fifteen minutes and didn’t see anything.
When the members of his platoon woke up
and were not shot as they stood
urinating on the ground,
the sentry decided he must have been
imagining things.
Still, something seemed strange.
He felt more surrounded than before.
It was unearthly.
It was the trees, he told himself later.
Yes, it’s the trees, and the grass,
and the sky.
They’re not fighting.
They’re not at war.
16
EASTER
If I could
I would see the sun making sherbet in the sky
and children running along the edge of their lives,
wishing for bowls and spoons,
sand kicking up behind their heels like bullets
just missing.
Each second would be a museum
as I look into their eyes
and see Ulysses in the wooden horse,
feel Africa touching Brazil.
Camels sip scotch through straws now,
trying to forget their humps,
but a whippoorwill calls its own name into the twilight
and the wind in the trees sounds like many hands
clapping behind a heavy door.
A dream kicks the wall of its womb.
The sky bends.
I feel pregnant with myself.
A herd of Zebra lopes past me,
looking for the mountains of Peru.
“I in them and you in me,
may they be perfectly one.”
—John 17:23
Copyright 1986 by Ken Woodley
(Dear Friends: In 1986, I self-published a 16-poem sequence as a chapbook: The Ghost Behind Your Eyes, based on what Jesus said toward the end of the Gospel of John, specifically the transcendent and, for humanity, potentially transformational 23rd verse of the 17th chapter: “I in them and you in me, may they be perfectly one.” The sequence begins on Good Friday and ends on Easter. Several hundred copies were printed and sold in a handful of Virginia bookstores. I sent one copy to the American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In a handwritten reply, he thanked me for sending him my “very good book.” His kind words humble my soul and lift my spirits to this day. Thirty-nine years later, I re-publish this sequence here for anyone who has discovered the ghost behind their eyes, everyone who is still searching and those who haven’t begun. God’s love and grace to you all, Ken Woodley)
By Ken Woodley
1
BOMBERS TAKE OFF FROM GOLGOTHA
The last shade of something
stalks the rim of night,
barely touching the tops of things,
sniffing the moonlight for food.
The stars are surrounded by burnt tea
and there is drinking.
Darkness walks past the ruins,
spreading like damson
toward the crusty edge.
One by one the constellations are unborn
and the Milky Way seems a beautiful scar.
From the jungle comes the sound of drumming
and the moon is swallowed by clouds
that look like an exploded letter bomb to God.
There are subtle chantings
that seem to be, or not.
People rub their ears
and graze further toward the edge of something.
Some prey is taken
and the night moves one
2
THE RED BALLOON
The red balloon floated away.
It was the one thing wrong with the sky.
That was all.
The red balloon just didn’t seem to fit in
with the white clouds and the blueness
of everything else up there.
“It clashes,” somebody said.
“You don’t see any red clouds, do you?”
Nobody said they had.
The red balloon looked like a drop of blood
in the sky as it floated higher and farther away.
But somebody had held it once.
Somebody had filled it with their own breath,
tied a small knot in it
and secured it with a piece of string.
Then somebody had given it to somebody else.
The red balloon stopped looking like
a drop of blood now.
It looked like somebody’s imagination
and people rubbed their eyes to be sure
they weren’t seeing things.
They weren’t.
When the red balloon was finally swallowed
by the sky
there wasn’t even a ripple.
It was just gone.
“God, I’ve grown up,” somebody said.
That was all.
3
AFTER THE BOMB
The wind exterminates annihilation,
checks its pulse with a dried leaf or two
and climbs a hill behind the barn.
The barbed wire doesn’t stop it.
The cows couldn’t chew it.
The wind plays the sound of crickets eating silence
and there is something else
along the wide black hearth,
tugging back at last syllables,
inventing the new language;
sheep will clothe themselves.
The wind stretches,
yawns and lifts a feather for examination,
blowing it against a sky
which cannot keep it.
The wind blows it north for the summer,
south for the winter,
looking for a season that fits.
The wind blows inside out,
climbs a mountain and falls off.
The hurricane bends everything to its knees.
4
THE CANNIBALS
There are no stars,
no moon,
just hearts beating in the darkness.
Somewhere
twigs snap underfoot.
Wild beasts scream their way
into human silence
and hide among the eaves, waiting.
The armies sit in darkness,
looking for some braille
to tell them this is just
a really black night.
Soldiers smell the enemy coming.
They feel the enemy touching,
the enemy panting,
muscles straining.
The heartbeats quicken
and sound like Morse code,
somebody sending signals
from behind enemy lines.
The arms of the enemy encase them.
The soldiers bite back.
The pain is wet and hot.
Their hearts suddenly sound
like a pantomime.
They taste their own body,
their own blood,
wondering whose skin it is
they’re wearing,
who they used to be.
5
WAR
Summer
is wintered
by teeth
sounding like black heels
crushing ice-covered snow
and a boy looks out the window
for Christmas.
Dinner ends.
A meadow screams “moo”
from the belly of a cow.
6
PEBBLES
The bullets kicking up sand
as they came toward the man
looked like pebbles skipping across a lake.
To skip a pebble across a lake
took the right kind of stone.
The best were like cookies
and you held them with the thumb and forefinger,
throwing with a sidearmed motion,
pretending the pebble was a plane
landing on a runway,
throwing over the lake’s surface,
angling it down slightly.
The man had skipped pebbles once.
Eleven skips was the most he’d ever seen.
7
IN THE CATACOMBS
My hands find the ghosts of wind and water
which haunt the world with their smoothness.
Such soft fossils in the stone,
my fingers feel like they are touching themselves.
I reach for an indentation and find a broken reflection.
I pick up one of my eyes along with some of the ceiling.
They become my nose and a piece of lip.
My hair and a look of pain
stick in my fingers and I hurt and bleed.
I am just as much a grave in this room as I am me.
But I remember opening my eyes for the first time.
Buildings were not broken by the colors.
Neither were the people.
Children ran through fields with their parents
who were also children,
picking flowers which did not burn them.
We spoke sky.
We spoke clouds.
Our accent came from everywhere
and we sang songs which made the elephants dance.
The world grew round and we rolled it to each other.
Nothing growled.
Everything kept growing.
I remember the sound of the first cannons.
It’s mice in the attic, we said, eating cheese.
We’ll get traps when we go to town in the morning.
I remember footprints in the snow.
I remember following.
It seemed like a prayer.
8
WAITING ON THE FALL-OUT
On the edge of everything
I catch a taxi to the harbor
where the boats lay still
and the gulls don’t speak.
Even the pier
holds tightly to its splinters,
giving nothing away
but my own drumbeat steps
as the mist tries me on for size.
I sit along the end of this half bridge
and wait for anything else,
hoping the stars
rule out the total winter.
A ricochet of light
and one has become like us.
There is no splashing,
only ripples
and the echo of my own slow dripping.
I stop remembering now,
only listen to the resonance.
Touch me.
Lose this definition.
9
THE STORM
I listen to my storm.
There are no words anymore,
no voice like winter thunder,
no lightning in my dreams.
It has rained for days
and the only sound is the river
pulling at roots of trees,
erasing the tracks of animals
that came to the bank for food
and the footprints of hunters who followed.
Black birds skate across a stratus pond
and I wonder about things.
The river, tumbling over itself,
sounds like sand being brushed off the sky
and I pray for something to stop this unwinding.
There is a noise.
I look up.
A bird has fallen through the ice
and it begins to rain.
Tomorrow the river may flood.
10
BREATHLESS
I am like a moon.
I am a white lung breathing through the night,
from crescent to full circle,
and then
nothing.
I am a body breathing,
but never enough at once
to never breathe again.
11
SECRET AGENT
I shadow myself
in the long puddles from yesterday’s rain.
Bedouin clouds cross their blue desert;
the city loses its grip and the sand takes over,
seagulls singing as if they are deaf.
I will leave no tracks on this beach.
The wind and tide are my safe house.
I have come all this way to watch waves
defect from the sea.
They look like someone coming over
from the other side,
breaking cover at the last possible moment,
spreading their secrets on this countertop coast.
I cup a foam cipher in my hands
but it soon disappears
and I am left decoding my palms,
my own wrinkles and veins.
12
THE DISTANCE
The distance
is someone else’s
frontyard
where children
play with a dog and a ball
and their parents
sit on the front porch
gazing off into the distance
which is someone else’s
frontyard
where children
play with a dog and a ball
and their parents
sit on the front porch
gazing off into the distance.
13
WINTERS
I walk across a field to where frost
has painted shattered glass on the ground.
Summer must have looked in the mirror,
seen autumn, and the reflection broke.
Even the clown trees cry,
dropping their circus leaves.
Soon the whole world will lie dead,
quiet as cotton, and cold.
There is an attic smell in the air.
I wonder if this is how our own winter
has been born.
Have we forgotten spring?
I kneel now, touching an ice-covered blade.
The frost melts and turns to dew.
My shadow feels the silent barking of the sun.
14
GOD CAME TO BREAKFAST
A star
fell into my cereal
this morning.
It left a hole
in the roof,
splattered milk
in my face,
and just lay
among the cornflakes,
waiting
for my spoon.
15
SURROUNDED
The sentry noticed something peculiar.
He was surrounded.
Something must have crept up on him during the night.
He dropped to his belly
and wriggled around a large boulder
to see what it was.
He waited fifteen minutes and didn’t see anything.
When the members of his platoon woke up
and were not shot as they stood
urinating on the ground,
the sentry decided he must have been
imagining things.
Still, something seemed strange.
He felt more surrounded than before.
It was unearthly.
It was the trees, he told himself later.
Yes, it’s the trees, and the grass,
and the sky.
They’re not fighting.
They’re not at war.
16
EASTER
If I could
I would see the sun making sherbet in the sky
and children running along the edge of their lives,
wishing for bowls and spoons,
sand kicking up behind their heels like bullets
just missing.
Each second would be a museum
as I look into their eyes
and see Ulysses in the wooden horse,
feel Africa touching Brazil.
Camels sip scotch through straws now,
trying to forget their humps,
but a whippoorwill calls its own name into the twilight
and the wind in the trees sounds like many hands
clapping behind a heavy door.
A dream kicks the wall of its womb.
The sky bends.
I feel pregnant with myself.
A herd of Zebra lopes past me,
looking for the mountains of Peru.
“I in them and you in me,
may they be perfectly one.”
—John 17:23
Copyright 1986 by Ken Woodley
Ken Woodley 