The ghost with his camera stays all night in my dreams,
on trains, in theaters, shy as a celebrity
with his ice-blackened hands and his face like a crushed Botticelli,
his eyes still day-dark violet
as the air thinning over Qomolangma.
He left the snowburned boy with the sand-blazing hair
in a colder summer, but he crowds the vest-pocket film
with fairies as delicate as paper chains,
actors wiping off greasepaint like time,
frauds, fools, fisher kings, all the faces
that last only between moments of light
and every frame fading the same clear shadow in,
a greater ghost than himself:
a bit of rock and a sweep of sky
white-bannered and hurtingly blue,
his death-wound and his haunting,
the view from the roof of dreams.