The Dead Live Among Us

Yesterday a friend and I visited the riverfront farmers' market in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. We got there late. It was hot. People were walking away carrying armfuls of flowers, lugging showy striped watermelons, tugging tired children out of the street.

We worried about the dog's paws and looked for shade under the vendors' tents. We passed tables of summer vegetables, racks of flowy clothes, scented soaps and lotions, a knife sharpener, bakers, potters and a pickle makers, a woman selling mussel pearl jewelry, an dog biscuit duo giving away samples and profit. We bought some kombucha. Fell for the child who asked, Can I pet your dog?  

At the end of the market, just before we turned to go back, I saw the one thing I hadn't expected to see: a car just like his. Yellow-and-black like a wasp and I was stung. I gasped and cried out, reflexively turning away to face the water. My friend put her arm around me. The tears did all the talking. A car just like his. It would have made me smile when he was still here. But of course, impossibly, he isn't.


THE DEAD LIVE AMONG US

The dead live among us
if they’re lucky

their photographs
weigh down the mantel

narrow the hallway
their things

share the darkness
in sealed attic boxes

the stained cookbook
wants to open

to their favorite meal
a son is caught wearing

their nose and upper lip
a daughter laughs

with their fabulous shoulders
siblings fight worry

with the spasm of their brow
the luckiest dead

are still present
on their birthdays

their failings and their virtues
recollected with wry

sad smiles with audible sighs
their grandchildren

still want them back
their dog hasn’t lost

their scent in his mind
and it will be many years

before they are strangers
to the living

many years
before everyone who knew them

becomes a look around the eyes
an image under glass.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poem in Appalachian Review

Image
  A slim package came yesterday in the mail. The Spring 2020 issue of Appalachian Review , which includes my poem "Almost Heaven, or Mixed-Race Roadtrip Following the Fall of Saigon." Past contributors to Appalachian Review include Pinckney Benedict, Wendell Berry, Wiley Cash, Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks, Silas House, Fenton Johnson, Barbara Kingsolver, Maurice Manning, Ann Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Neela Vaswani, Frank X Walker, Crystal Wilkinson, etc. etc., so I feel I'm in excellent company.  The journal used to be called Appalachian Heritage , a name that too many people, according to its website, associated with "a simplistic view of Appalachia as a place frozen in a quaint, bucolic, homogenous past or, at worst, a particular ultra-conservative brand of politics and identity." Hence, the name change.  It's a shame that the word "heritage" has come to carry so much ugly baggage. But it's w
Read more

Something About Secrets

I remember it was on a school bus. Was I in middle school? Maybe. But wait, I didn't take the school bus in middle school, so it must have been elementary school, when my family had first moved to Tennessee from Florida. No matter. The bus was bumping along a narrow, wooded road on a steep hillside. The road followed the winding path of a creek that lay like a dark ribbon of shine in the ravine below. We were all in shade and I was a little bit scared. Sometimes the bus's right wheels went a few inches off the pavement, and I imagined how easy it would be for us all to go tumbling down the ravine into the murky glimmer of that creek.
Read more

The Story Silence Tells

Image
Last week I participated in  Southern Griots: Preserving Local History Through Storytelling at the Cape Fear Museum. Organized by Athenian Press , the event featured a lovely array of artists in different genres (poetry, playwriting and screenwriting, dance, filmmaking, music). We shared our work and talents, each of us emphasizing art's ability to lift up, preserve, and pass along human stories that might otherwise be lost. The night before, in anticipation of the event, I kept thinking about stories. Not just those we tell, but those kept secret. As an Asian-heritage person, I know that silence is woven into my cultural legacy. My Asian-American friends and I have talked about the frustrating silence of our Asian parents, about the lack of demonstrativeness, both physical and emotional. Other cultures have this too, of course. Brits are famous for their "stiff upper lip." And Appalachian hillbilly culture, despite its propensity for tall tales, is known for endur
Read more