It’s Thanksgiving and I’m entertaining
ghosts:
Uncle Seth drunkenly carving
a turkey,
one eye on his old beat-up TV set.
Aunt Florence screaming at my shrieking, circling cousins,
mashing potatoes with one hand, draining turnips
with the other.
My Baptist grandmother threatening to leave, doesn't need a ride home, will walk,
just found out wine
is going to be served with dinner.
She probably would, strengthened by the
enormity of her moral rectitude,
except her house is five miles down the
road and it’s bitching cold.
I never
thought I would miss them, but I do today,
just a little.
We were alive then and our little circle of
purgatory enfolded by a gray and silver world,
by tapestries of black branches,
by winter birds.
We had dreams.
