“I am a spirit of no common rate,
The ghost of Elvis came in August and he was always, of course, blue. August is a blue month–red-blue of the carnal sunset slash across the dusk, new-mown scent of sex and dirt in the grass of the vacant lot; electric blue, like the intolerably hot, perfect parking-lot sky at noon; then there was the deepest mystery in the hours after midnight when you know you shouldn’t be out and your chest is tight with fear and excitement so it hurts–that was a very dark blue.
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It was 1956, and it was a different land. Paradise had only just left America, and it lingered in the summer like the arcadia of an ornate whitewashed bandstand under the dark enameled leaves in the park. Elvis was a late figure of Paradise, and, in his time, illuminated under the fireworks at night, you could see dark figures in silhouette, hair streaming as they ran along the top of the ridge, between the trees.
And Elvis was the ghost along the railroad tracks, and the mound of off-white stones beneath the tracks, and the row of trees along the tracks where you hid and watched.
