Ghost of The Living: Oboes at 3 AM - Poetry - Poem

Literary Review, Spring, 2003 by Joel Peckham

Ghost of the Living: Oboes at 3 AM

   Startled by everything. Shaken
   by small animals nosing out of fog. There is
   so much I do not know. And fear. My own breath. My own
   footsteps. I walk out making nothing, and worse, like it
   this way. Hidden in the heaviness of leaves, the long-vowelled,
   open chord of things forgotten or abandoned
   and always there, always nudging at me, touching at all
   sides, cold, cold and heavy. I have heard, I hear the oboe
   in the neighbor's house playing the same small part
   over and over, so naked, aching without the other instruments,
   Mozart of course, and think of that thin boy rising to it
   up into it, the one (who almost died of heat-stroke, playing pick
   with the other boys last August, the one who'd
   give up his painter's hands and wispy grace, for one
   good move to the hoop, one touch from the lips of some
   jennifer some elizabeth, her warm face pressed to the back
   of his neck. The one) I heard and hear each morning
   failing, hating the master with a heat all wrong for what
   he's playing. But is silent now. Asleep for hours. Unless

   he lies awake or starts up at his window, or has crept out
   walking somewhere in a T-shirt and undershorts two sizes
   too big, unable to shake the song, or the piece of it
   that keeps coming back. Like the ghost of a living friend
   stepped out of woods, a freezing ripeness, cold moonflower
   accusing--and confused, saying why am I still here? What
   are you doing to me? A voice you try to ignore because you
   can't bear it, can't go on that way--with an ache
   in your chest that could split an oak, or the hearth itself
   or the boy holding a pillow to his face to mute his own
   scream, but who could make a thing like an oboe played
   badly and with anger sing with what he feared, and had, to do.

Joel Peckham is an assistant professor at Georgia Military College. His poems have been published in The Black Warrior Review, The Malahat Review, Nimrod, Passages North, The Sycamore Review, and The Southern Review. Nightwalking; his first full-length poetry collection, was published by in 2001.