Resurrection Clothes

The Visit Beached in his lean-back chair   He sits reclin ed and staring into what   I cannot reach .   An introvert at soul , h e comes alive    W hen younger spirits enter , sit   A ttendant after banter in the circle   Discovering their own lives inside   His gift of weaving wings from spiderwebs     Memories of dialogs gone by   Characters like sibling stars   Intermingling until   A laugh erupts and bubbles from the belly up   U ntil it catches fire a round the circle   Fills and lifts o ff high    Into eternal elements.         Inspired by Mary Lou Kowalski's little book of poems and commentary entitled Old Monk, this is the first (and only, so far) in my hoped-for collection: Old Married.    

A Letter From a Friend Who’s Dead The other day I got a letter from a friend who’s dead. She wrote it first, of course, to tell me things she wanted said about our friendship, all the fun we’d had, the talks about things near our hearts, things happy and things sad. And now I’m thinking how so many dearest friends are gone: the Judy who died years ago, my nearly-sister Gayle, Patricia, Mrs. Faulk, Mary Ann and Sally, Bernie and the Judy I received the letter from…. Then it occurs to me how all the people at the breakfast table of my childhood left and left and left and left, and I alone am here, recalling dimly or with unexpected clarity those ancient times. But then I think how life has multiplied the friends, the family—never to replace the ones now gone, of course, but filling in some empty spaces, holes left gaping when they went. How many more will go before I join the great collection on the other side? I cannot know, of course, and th...

Of all the detritus in this drawer (why did I save this stuff?) amid the paperclips, the capless pens and penless caps,  the rubber bands, the scraps of paper with a title of a book  that someone recommended once, the business cards,  addresses from old envelopes, my daddy’s magnifying glass —again I see him reading as he sat in his upholstered chair—   there is a tape… An old cassette... the label says it's “Prince and Leslie playing.” Underneath the names I’d written “12” and “7.”   Then, past the early '80s tunes they had recorded from the radio —and so I’d never played it through, just thinking, “Well, I’ll listen to the rest someday,” and now that I am cleaning out the drawer I let it play on that old tape recorder that I found while cleaning off a shelf the other day— I hear my children’s voices. “I’m thinking pos-tiv-ly,” the younger drawls. “Prince is gonna…” Crack! A cue stick hits a ball and then more cr...