PSYCHICS

Sometimes I used to wake up with moonlight tucked up
to my chin like warm smothering wool
and hear drops of water smash into the bath.
Then, wanting no more sound than the gentle
irritation of water on enamel
I’d leave my bed and turn at the door
to watch myself grunt and roll over.

Astral projection, a pattern
of upbringing no-one can alter,
even a genetic faculty it worked
like a curse not a charm dividing me
from what I felt and was never
exorcised by the cold rinse I had
before going back to the empty bed.

My father endured the gift, too,
telling my mother how he’d struggle
to get back to her and himself
as he drifted above the bed
watching the rope of phosphorescence
which tied him to his navel dwindle
to an almost invisible thread.

And for his father the thread was broken.
Detached, he lived on higher planes
becoming at each remove a vaguer
more omnipotent apparition of himself.
When my grandmother lay haemorrhaging
he left for work to come back ten hours later
and receive the news that she had died.

It didn’t matter. Whether fleshed or ghostly
she was always summoned and embraced
as dream substance. He used his other gifts
to touch the real. In the Great War a voice
guided him through a doorway hot enough
to melt bullets and one when he refereed
a hockey match a player was injured.

He said “I knelt down. The shin was broken.
I could feel the break underneath the skin.
The player was crying with pain.
I knew I had the power so I healed him.
It was strange how all the players
witnessed the miracle and then
immediately forgot it.”

**  I wrote this after the return of an adolescent nightmare where I would see myself asleep. My father had similar, but more distressing nightmares perhaps brought on by traumatic experiences in the Second World War and the anecdote about his father’s experience was told to me by grandfather himself.