Thursday, November 27, 2014

Gray Day



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.