The Dead

1

The dead are dead,

so I can’t call up Ray at 7 a.m.

when I know he’s sleeping off

a drunk and ask, “Hey,

remember when you said you were sick

of waiting for me to be poet laureate?

Well, wake up, listen to this crazy story . . . ”

And then the two of us would cry

for a while and afterward he’d say,

as usual, “Jesus, it’s the crack of Dawn.”

And I’d complain, as usual,

“Oh my god, are you smoking in bed?”

No.

When my beloveds are dead,

2

I’m the only one talking.

I wake at three, stare at shadows,

get up, wander downstairs, drop

my forehead onto the cool

Formica, but the stubborn sun

refuses to rise for two more hours.

It’s just me and my unshared joke

switching like minnows in a net—

half-truths,

like a mistake I meant to explain

or hearts dribbling out.

Like late nights

and the last drops of beer

in a tipped-over can.

3

Some dead I dream about, some

I don’t. Ray can’t be bothered

with night visits, and Baron probably

wouldn’t be caught dead,

yet Jilline’s showed up, sleet

or shine, for twenty-five years—

red-maned, lipsticked,

dressed to the hilt in TJ Maxx finery,

sometimes even lugging

a curly-haired baby girl,

who, when she catches sight of me,

opens her fat arms in joy.

But what about the dead people

I don’t love, the ones

4

I run from

and am stuck with?

Grandmom Potter, for instance,

who made fun of my dad’s beard

and informed twelve-year-old me

that if my parents got divorced,

it would be my fault. Once

she told my sister she’d never be

talented, told me I’d never be beautiful.

She’s been dead for forty years,

and I don’t miss her.

What lingers is her house,

its perfume of Salems and Pledge,

old lady books stashed everywhere.

5

She left The Good News Bible handy

on the back of the toilet, shelved

her Reader’s Digest Condensed

under the air conditioner,

and they return to me with a sweetness

they never possessed in life.

I conjure the world of the dead

via the world of things.

I cannot separate Baron from his dahlias

or Ray from his record collection.

Grandmom’s squeaky desk chair

outlives her mean mouth.

And Ken, my high school boyfriend,

who crashed his car into a tree in 1982—

6

How clearly I see his double-knit slacks

the plaid ones his mother made him wear;

how clearly I recall his tender brown knuckles.

Perhaps the dead yearn for such softenings.

For decades I tried not to think of Ken,

who embarrassed me with his chunky

black glasses, his terrible pants,

his math-team braggadocio.

But the truth is the truth:

after he kissed me in the band-room closet,

I came back day after day for more.

And Grandmom was always

the nicest grownup in the house when a kid

started puking up Christmas dinner.

7

This is why I struggle to imagine Dante’s hell,

everyone slotted into their circles,

going through their approved motions,

enduring their appropriate punishments,

as if the inferno were just another

work week: put in the time, the effort,

and management might take notice.

My dead are slackers and wanderers.

They show up late or forget

to leave when the party’s over . . .

Like Grandpap Miller, who quit school

in eighth grade but can’t keep his scarred

hands out of my poems. Like Uncle Paul,

smashed to rags and splinters in Quang Nam—

8

Even war fades to an ear-splitting grin.

Great-Aunt Esther plays penny-ante poker

under the glare of a bare lightbulb,

wheezing as she rakes in the cash.

“The snow was general all over Ireland,”

James Joyce writes in The Dead,

“falling faintly through the universe

and faintly falling,

like the descent of their last end,

upon the living and the dead.”

James Joyce who is dead gazes with me

up into the flakes as they sift down,

down into the darkness. We taste

their flutter kiss, the remoteness of their breath.

9

Dante, too, is gone. Is he musing over snow

instead of hell? Maybe he returns to his beloveds

in the body of a big old dog

slumping against his owner’s boots.

The grievances of my dead cat Ruckus

are enshrined in the sour face

of the Dutch-girl cookie jar

that my dead Granny Miller bought

at Mapes Five and Dime in 1939,

a present to herself after she was knocked up

by Grandpap and they had to get married quick.

Hand in hand, my dead flit away from the streetlights

and slide into a borrowed Chevy

parked in the alley.

10

The radio crackles weather and news.

Ordinary time travels on.

The factory whistle, the creak of a gate—

amid joys and misery,

the underworld sends tidings.

Yes, say the dead. They always say yes,

and I hear the squeak of Grandmom Potter’s

desk chair as I bounce on it in the back room,

as I glower at Emily Post’s Etiquette, at Erma Bombeck’s

joke book, at a fancy pen set that looks like it was swiped

from a bank, at the Gold Star Mothers plaque

that Grandpop Potter tacked to the wall

above the bronze baby shoes

of his mutilated son.

11

Perhaps babies are the saddest story.

I think of the unbaptized in the Inferno,

big-eyed, bewildered. In my dreams,

Jilline props a black-haired girl on her hip.

Living, my friend never gave birth to a child.

Living, I never gave birth to a daughter.

Yet a quarter-century after cancer

killed the mother who was not her mother,

this infant, neither conceived nor born,

exists in the dreams of an aging mother

who is not her mother.

She beams and crows and opens her arms.

I press my cheek against her softness,

inhale her winter scent.

12

“You’re never too young to carry your dead,”

say the dead.

They peer out from their sun-faded albums.

They squint at the camera.

They lurk at the edge of the frame.

Those who lived before us

seem puzzled by our presence.

Those we survive stare past us . . .

we can’t quite catch their searching eyes.

Baron winces at America.

Aliza’s middle school prom dress

glitters like crushed ice under the gymnasium lights.

Coty and Monica and the father who murdered them

coax a kitten from a tree.

13

Still, “what is a woman standing on the stairs

in the shadow, listening to distant music?”

Joyce asks this question, James Joyce

who is dead. The woman in his thoughts

pauses in the tremor of memory—

the young man she kissed and forgot,

who died without ever knowing her

as she is now, at this moment,

this wingbeat that is already gone,

that can never be reprised. Her husband

looks up and recognizes what he does not

understand. His eyes are fixed on her bright face.

He shivers in the draft from the open hall door.

Outside, the snow is falling harder.

14

Alive, I turn toward my absence.

But how impossible it is to predict

what will clutter another’s memory.

Things crowd.

Granny’s torn housedress with the slip

peeking through. Grandmom’s stiff

green couch. The way Grandpop Potter

snorted in the La-Z-Boy.

Empty Modelo bottles on Ray’s dingy table.

Jilline’s rhinestone heels, size twelve.

Grandpap Miller’s long-beaked oil cans,

blackened and greasy. What tangles will

I bestow on you—

my dear ones, my strangers, my left-behinds?

**

The dead are dead.

I’m the only one talking.

Some dead I dream about, some

I run from.

She left The Good News Bible handy.

How clearly I see his double-knit slacks.

This is why I struggle to imagine Dante’s hell.

Even war fades to an ear-splitting grin.

Dante, too, is gone. Is he musing over snow?

The radio crackles weather and news.

Perhaps babies are the saddest story:

you’re never too young to carry your dead.

Still, what is a woman standing on the stairs?

Alive, I turn toward my absence.

Dawn Potter is poet laureate of Maine. Her most recent poetry collection is Calendar (2024), and her poems and essays appear in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She directs poetry programs at Monson Arts and lives in Portland, Maine.