Readers' poem

Revenant by Paul Groves

This is the house where I shall be a ghost.
New families will come to haunt these rooms.
I shall not be an irksome poltergeist
sweeping up artefacts, my spectral broom’s
insistence summoning an earnest priest
to exorcise and purify. I’ll sit
with all the proper calm of the deceased

and whittle scrimshaw. Death will manumit
this troubled soul and let him live without
pain or taxes. Children will grow up
beneath his patient gaze. Desire and doubt,
those all-too-human attributes, will cup
odd moments in their hands then let them flow
between their fingers. I will understand

the shit and copulation and the slow
ageing process. Nothing will be planned:
I’ll drift along time’s river without cease,
never bored and always non-judgemental,
encountering an everlasting peace
that will be both mundane and transcendental.
I’ll only want for love, and that will be

the greatest absence. I will see it shared
but cease to give or take it endlessly,
and that will be intolerably hard
– although it should be tolerated, for
its disembodied lack year after year
would be a form of presence. Once I tire
of longing for it I shall disappear.

From New Welsh Review Issue 78