THE GHOST OF ETAN PATZ


I am diffuse.
I am loose as vapor filling
an inert room.
Like air, I am where
there is nothing else.
And though they came looking,
and though they came digging,
there was apparently nothing.
So I am always missed
and never found
in the New York Earth Room.

It's decades now, though time
is timeless in this state. Don't speak
of dimensions
or that it's decades now in the dirt,
in the dust, in the small spaces
between the crumbs of earth
that fill my home.

I was physical, sidewalking, and
as curious as a boy alone in the world
for the first time.
It was just
similes. Because really
I was the same thing I am now,
only concentrated
and in form.

Now I am just
out of reach.
One may think in this angled
evening sunlight I am going to
appear, warm in the warmth,
dusty as memory,
that I am
limnable in these very words.
I am not.
I am abstracted from
spirit, neither of shadow
nor light, and I
move around the spare specks
floating in the air, barely there,
in a peace as thin and unhaunted
as a calm.


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