Category: Mammals

“Ghost” and the Machinery of Grief

~ Kat Couch

We’re going to do something a little different today and go the podcast route with a look at the poem “Ghost” from last October. Actually, one generation removed from the poem, because the hosts of the discussion are reading from the lyrics of a bluegrass song by Kat’s Sundog based on the poem. The lyrics follow below.

The discussion itself was generated with a Google Notebooks tool, but objections to AI aside, one thing about these tools is clear: chatbots struggle to write a decent poem, but their analysis of poetry is extraordinarily good and sometimes provocative. At the very least, they provide a starting point for further insight.

Here are the song’s lyrics:

Ghost
(A traditional bluegrass song by the band Kat’s Sundog)

[Intro, instrumental, slow-paced banjo & fiddle picking, melancholy mandolin, building to a full band entry before settling into verse tempo]

[Verse 1]
A trail cam tied to an old pine limb
In the cool, thin mountain air
Caught a shadow movin’ through the gray
Of a cold September day
A bobcat, slow n’ easy on her paws
A rabbit swinging from her jaws
Eight forty-eight in the autumn pines
Though the dead ain’t counting time

[Pre-Chorus]
And the picture frames what the heart can’t keep
The sigh of a soul released
We freeze the moment to save the spark
Before it fades into the dark

[Chorus]
Yeah, we’re keepin’ your ghost here
Though you’re long gone
Clingin’ to the shade you left
Of what’s left here
Holding our breath like a hollow
Can’t lay you down, can’t follow

[Verse 2]
That mountain cottontail swaying
The hunter on her pendulum way
Through the greasewood and the brush
Beast too beautiful to touch
Stripes on her haunches in the dimming light
Autumn moon makin’ her bright eyes wild
Slides through the branches like a work of art
Stealing what’s still breathing from my beating heart

[Bridge]
Oh, little one, you’re wantin’ to go
Where the wild things run and the cold winds blow
But babe, give us back his form
We’re holdin’ on, we’re holdin’ on

[Instrumental break, fiddle solo over driving banjo]

[Chorus]
Yeah, we’re keepin’ your ghost here
Though you’re long gone
Clingin’ to the shade you left
Of what’s left here
Holding our breath like a hollow
Can’t lay you down, can’t follow

[Outro]
Well, she’s carrying the host here
We’d love back to livin’
Bringin’ back the heartache we bin given
[Fading mandolin]

And if you want to listen to the song, it’s here: https://suno.com/s/bB7Qh9uHaXeMOFjg

Ghost Podcast

Fetching Lili’s Ashes

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

A bill from the urgent care center
in Mesa, Arizona,
is addressed to Lisa Steinhoff,
whoever she was:
no one called Steinhoff lives
on Painted Rock Trail today.
I lean over the console of the truck,
write “Not at this address!”,
and slip it in the outgoing mail.

Ten days ago Saturday
we put our Russian Blue down,
after midnight, bundling her crate
into the Subaru for the long drive,
to the only open vet, far out of town.
I sweet-talked her, our little girl
(though in people years
she was sixty-four, or sixty-five).

But repeating the sad drive again,
leaving the clinic again,
this time in full sun June
I carry the box with her ashes
to the car, gently, like a newborn,
cradling the deep blue bag,
the ribboned sleeve from the crematorium.

I half expected to lift the lid
for her last lesson of dust,
but the box is fastened shut:
Spanish cedar, corners rounded,
joints seamless, sweetly smelling
in the unseasonable heat.

And on the forty-mile route back north
despite myself, knowing she is not her body,
not at this address,
I talk to the cedar box,
warm in the cab of the truck
warm as her head was in the moment before,
her ears then, like old carpet,
ragged with age.

Wyoming Border, Bison

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

I drive late, going north,
winds so strong out of the foothills
you’ll see eighteen-wheelers
tossed on their sides in the median.
One or two at least, before we make the border,
snow bleaching the Front Range.

The very dead of winter now,
like the chaplain said.

Where our headlights empty,
the stations of my commute drift by:
Carr, Owl Canyon, Buckeye Road,
and the electric shock of the great plains:
they train astronauts in Wyoming,
folks who feel at ease in our cold, cold spaces.

On a high ridge, before the Welcome sign,
a rancher has erected the silhouette of a bison,
knocked together with two-by-fours,
blank, branding even the grass.
And below it, the real animals move
like shades in the underworld,
dozens of them, shrugging off the squall
that’s closed the highway from Casper to Wheatland,
closed the 80 west, all the way to Rawlins.

We’ve brought them back, the bison,
to say goodbye.

My hands itch to touch the coarse mat of their hair,
to finger the frost-crust on the crown
of their siegehammer heads,
the ears that may
have finally stopped listening
to everything we loved, to everything we feared,
to everything we said.

Camera

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Every morning, as I go out,
I catch sight of my Nikon
on the hallway dresser
where I have deliberately left it,
charged with promise,
the magic lantern of schoolkids’ stories —
knowing that if I don’t take it
I’m sure to see something astonishing
and only have these dubious words.

I am always right:
the cones of the blue spruce
in the late winter light
drape on the top branches
like streetseller wares, plumbed fruit
hanging from his shoulders.
Or along the base
of our eastern slope,
where stubborn white pelts of snow
depress the prairie grass,
the veins of deer tracks
trickle out and finger.

I take the camera, then,
convinced that I have made
the whole world suddenly dull.
And I am always right:
what I saw in the spruce
I couldn’t tell you,
the tired interminable drupe of the bough /
not at all like vulture wings,
or the ratcatcher swinging
from a shoulder yoke, by their tails,
this late winter catch of cone.
How the deer are gone again,
and left us the mundane definition
of their feet, more loss
than lotuses.