What it feels like to be a canadian ghost: again, with Jack 

   

What is seen in the distance when the murmurings of some defeated ideas, or lives, or even dreams are suddenly manifest?
     A ghost. (Jack Spicer, from A Fake Novel About the Life
                                                           of Arthur Rimbaud)

Your life does not count

Even if I can number among the defeated not just the idea,
   but gary's receding grave (of christmas past), 

filled with glass, and squat to the head til I lilt into Main Street: 
   soft step here & veiny softness there, gosling's

quiet step to lakes and back and to my Secret Sam in acrylic
   mitts? Smiling through the lens

Everything is fixed to a point

Like soft shoe over bridges, through alleys and to a lake and back
   Waterless fountain at the park: or

the exact grainy spot he stood on &  I consigned to dear space,
   gary's most of all,

ecstatic I'd consigned anything as delicate as that & his mostly
   because of a gosling step

Give up

Wish I could (for his dear sake): dead don't hang light on me
   like they used to! Scarborough Fair,

in particular, can't make a 60s sage garden die more, not even
   in song, space between us 

a matter of a gray evening & stolen child-plant (or whatnot),
   tamped down at dusk

The very words I write
Do not purify

But, again, I thought at that very spot stepped a gosling-boy, purity
   & without math knew something'd last

and that space really could love him, too. Who wouldn't leave
   him receding like that. A matter of a stolen lily

And the lake he would not so much as dream of soiling
   (were it a popsicle stick!) could love him, too

Love makes the discovery wisdom abandons

Yes, after the act

I gave you my imaginary hand and you give me your imaginary
      hand and we walk together (in imagination) over the earthly
      ground