Will Schutt

Three Ghosts

AFTER GIORGIO ORELLI

One goes by the name of Mark, I think.
Every time I ride by him on my bike
he asks if I have seen his socks.
“Everything else I own I got second hand.
But for the socks I paid a fortune
in Rome. Or else on a hill in Buda
overlooking Pest, sealed off by the Danube.”

Another one is shy, earthy as an oven.
It falls to me to greet her first. Peering
into seashells, curiously engaged or in a daze,
she seems not to notice she’s headed
straight for the waves, yet pulls back (by design?)
each time they seem about to break.

A third, from the look of him, must be
a thousand years old and can be heard
crying to strangers in a rush of excitement:
“Have you noticed the first sign of spring
is always, even in the city, the smell of jasmine?”

There are others I’d like to name for you,
iconic, iconoclastic.
When our paths cross
they smile as if in spite of time
we know each other,
as if to say: “Here I am,
just as I was, toward myself unjust . . . ”

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Will Schutt is the author of Westerly, winner of the 2012 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His translation of the selected poems of Edoardo Sanguineti is forthcoming from Oberlin College Press.