My grandfather was given to believing

In ghosts beside the Holy Ghost. As a boy

He felt an invisible hand clap on his head

As a voice murmured, “You are in my power.”

As a man he heard his mother’s voice in the pulpit.

In some lights he could picture people’s souls

As shrouds of fog or stray bits of apparel,

Shirttails poking out, secret banners waving.

He knew what faith could do, that hidden star

Imploded at the galaxy’s black heart,

And he had faith. He wanted a technique.

He knew there was a way to make his faith

Devour its cosmic doubts and spit them back

As the moving mountains of both space and time.

Time led him on to death. And space confined him.

He thought – if he could only pull them apart

And not unweave himself. He believed his soul

Was safe, because it also hid within him,

Separate and pristine, a bead of meaning,

A seed in time and space which, once beyond them,

Would blossom in eternity, just waiting.

But let him move this saltshaker across the table.

If he could do that, simply with a thought,

What couldn’t he do? What my grandfather wanted

Was mind enough to move things with a thought.

And he believed that faith was a technique,

But there had to be others. Jesus came

To tell him there were no others, and faith itself

Was not invented to move saltshakers.

But Jesus came to him. Who wouldn’t want that?

Who wouldn’t want to walk with him in a garden,

On a sunny day, in a cloister of fresh flowers?

He would make you feel special and would not flatter,

But speak about the world that you could make,

You would have the power to make, which he would give you.

No one could get enough of such a person.

Charisma (the heroin of personality) –

My grandfather wanted to have that, too:

To be the one the young monks flocked behind,

Quacking their questions, and to stop every so often

To answer them like a cloud across the sun –

Not ominous but with refreshing coolness.

Gandhi, it is said, took walks like that.

One entered in the flow of his current interests,

In honey bees, or salt recovery, or spinning wheels.

Who wouldn’t want in the cool of the day to walk

With one who knew everything about you,

More even than you knew? That was the secret.

The faith that walked on water was a power

My grandfather wanted, with its homely gifts

For treating time and space like salt and pepper.

A dash of either and the real was changed

Into the spicy soup of the unreal.

To taste that, and to make that simply happen.

And doesn’t it matter to want something better

And not a raise or more job self-esteem,

But something on a plane so rarefied

You lived there like a migrant hummingbird

Or monarch butterfly, crossing the Gulf,

Going north or south and feeding on the sugar

Of ecstasy, existing in that wingbeat,

The sky, the expanse of water, no land in sight?

To put his hand through air into the future,

And heal the dying child. To reach back with ten fingers

And raise the loved one, waiting in the grave.

Because he knew that Christ had done these things,

My grandfather wanted to do them, too.

He wanted to leave his mark on the eternal,

To manipulate the supernatural stuff

That he was sure was everywhere, like the airwaves.

And on the radio he threw his voice

Against the willing air that rippled with it.

He called himself the Shepherd of the Air

And gathered his flock of insubstantial strays

From the antennas of Los Angeles.

I’ve told you this so you can know this man,

My grandfather, a little, as I tell my story,

The only real ghost story I know,

A holy ghost story, complete with blood and terror,

For it unfolds at night, and someone or something

Risen from the dead plays a crucial role

At scaring the living Jesus out of somebody.

It may be Jesus himself who did the scaring.

It was a dry and cool November evening.

Los Angeles collected all its lights,

Some still, some strung on moving threads,

Into its basin beside the ocean’s darkness.

This was the vastness where my grandfather worked,

Alone in his church office, recording a sermon

On tape, and playing it back, and hearing himself

Explain the spiritual power of some new thing,

Some drug or diet or mental exercise

That had excited him. The ghost was coming,

The first he’d ever seen, after years of wishing

That he could see them everywhere.

Hypnotist, Metaphysician, Parapsychologist,

Quester in the Dreamworld, Channeler,

These were roles he played or he pretended.

And now a real ghost, torn from the cosmos,

Was coming to his office to address him.

There was a step, ringing on the stairwell,

Although my grandfather couldn’t hear it,

Or hear the doorknob turn, the presence enter,

For he was listening to himself quote scripture,

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Red letters

His voice turned into living words, like song.

Then, out of the tangled mesh of chapter and verse,

The blood of Jesus’ speech on the filmy page

Spilled suddenly across the carpeted floor.

My grandfather looked up and saw the man,

And not as in his Bible recitations.

Bleeding, yes, but dressed in business clothes.

In fact, dressed as he was in business clothes,

About my grandfather’s height, about his size,

Bald with a little silver hair combed sideways,

And wearing horn-rimmed glasses, lips parted

To speak. The ghost had on the same white shirt.

And both wore ties, the same tie, with the same knot.

But Grandfather couldn’t see these things for the blood,

The blood coming from the hands and feet –

Bare feet in a business suit, with familiar hands,

And the blood from the famous wounds printing the carpet

And spreading over the things on the glass-topped desk.

The bleeding man in the dark suit looked familiar.

And his voice, too, sounded strange in the same way

Grandfather’s voice did when he played it back.

But the question that he asked as he stood there bleeding

Was not one Grandfather ever asked himself:

“Why are you wasting your time on all this nonsense?”

He saw a soul wounded by his existence

And told the world and us it was Jesus Christ.

The years into old age and death were set then.

And I have often thought about those years.

For this was the peak moment in family history,

The Lord come unto Granddad to rebuke him

And all the supernatural confirmed.

For he did not turn away from his desires,

But took a new way, or an old way he’d forgotten.

Life with the Holy Spirit, as he called it,

Led him to crowds as he had never known them,

The leaning forward masses who could see

Something peculiar that they wanted, too,

Bathing the old man in its thrilling spotlight.

Even as his body gave up its powers –

Abandoning a right hand’s cunning, breaking a hip,

And draining from the corner of his mouth –

Wheeled into the presence of believers,

He basked in their true love and stuck by his story.

They led him a merry dance until he died.

Mark Jarman

The Hudson Review

55th Anniversary Issue

Spring 2003

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