Ghosts
Occasionally, I will dream of one
or another of them, my grandparents
now all gone, buried in the ground
or stacked in mausoleum walls
like mail in old post office boxes,
all of their bones, dressed like
the living, still retrievable
if one were so inclined.
And in my dreams they must
be in their early seventies, seniors,
certainly, but still coherent and able-
bodied and wearing clothes that I
remember they wore, I suppose.
At least nothing looks out of place.
They don't come to me together.
Husbands are never with their wives.
They come alone and silent and stand
off to the side, where at some point
I am surprised to see them there,
and I'm happy, like I have just found
a forgotten childhood toy or a book
I thought I had lost. It's just a moment
of passing rediscovery. You know
how dreams are. Nothing ever
lasts so much as lingers.
Waking, I lose them again.
More slowly than other dreams.
Their echoes seem longer and from
farther off. I might find myself
repeating a name, a breath
on my lips, just more than a thought.
Horace or Ida, Marguerite or Mitch.
The kind of names someone might find
written on an old love letter or on the deed
of a house. Names you find in cellars.
It must be that some part of me
conjures them to fade again like a ripple
on a pond, and to what end? Except
to say that our stories are not ours alone,
and they travel from great distances
and genetic depths that are yet
to be decoded or translated. We have
hidden paths that connect us, each of us
casting forward and back, and either
we continue or we do not. That's a fact.
But time will pass, and those we've lost
still have some substance, some
presence in their former clothes, connected
to an impulse, a firing in our brains,
a catalyst to the fires of our mythology.
which also passes like the echo
of a name. Like an oatmeal cookie recipe.
Like a card game. Like cigar smoke
and laughter.
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