print previewback CLAUDIA EMERSON
Ghost-Road
It leads to a house you will never see again,
the friend dead who lived there—the man’s son,
Claude says, the same as his ghost. There was a time
you could sit on the front porch beside him
and listen for the Model A—familiar hush
of rubber and dust, downshift, you know the sound,
the way the engine idled unseen as though waiting
to give up on you. Cedar-lined, a yearlong
fog of dust-blue berries its canopy, the road
was made too straight, uncanny, strict as
a plumb line gravity-taut, strict as a wall.
In this, you suppose you could find the what to blame:
its coming and going too much the same; you can
still hear it—the too-straight of an emptying way. 
