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...