My father kept his motion sensor tuned
to frequencies beyond me, the flux and sweep

of spirit women’s dresses along the floor.
I couldn’t even make them haunt my sleep,

his ghosts less real to me than bedtime tales.
But I still followed him from year to year

through long-abandoned houses, tapped the walls
the way he taught me, held my breath to hear

the sounds he swore were more than just the wind.
The time the needle on his sensor shook

so hard in some dim stairwell he snapped a photo
and rushed home to his darkroom, I couldn’t look

(blurred figure caught inside a web of light)
for long enough to make him think—look closer!—

that I believed it wasn’t a double-exposure.

Caitlin Doyle is an Irish-American poet based in Florida. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Guardian, the Yale Review, Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Best New Poets, as well as featuring on the PBS NewsHour Online Poetry Series, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry