After my wife died
and the friends left
and the flowers also died

I'd come home from work
and stand in the doorway
and, as I'd done for twenty years,
call into the house

"Hey-loh-oh!"
up to the octave, down to the fifth
hand on the doorknob
waiting for her to call back
from some unseen cutting board
or pot of paint
waiting in that moment when
she had not yet not answered.

Mata Hari's accountant pulls my coat
says I've overlooked some things
picks his teeth with a straightened paper clip
jaundiced skin, still wears the green eyeshade

Says I've overlooked some things
the missing L in poke a dot
homeless worms on rained-on sidewalks, slowing to stillness
the way that girl behind the fish counter looks at me
clears her throat as she scoops the scallops

Who's on first? still chasing that one
the revving engine of thoughts thinking thoughts
again again, and again again again
black limbs in winter wind
branching to branches and smaller to twigs

Mata Hari's accountant clucks his tongue
remembers Florsheim Shoes and Howdy Doody
saw the USA in his Chevrolet
filling the ashtray with Lucky butts
Gene Autrey swallowed under that ten-gallon hat
how'd they keep him on the horse?

Now it's all changed
nothing adds up
columns of figures snaking twisting off pages' edges
red and black ink pool at the ledger's seam
to blossom into violet rorschachs . . .
Look! two dolphins with clowns on their backs
leaping through rings of flame or clouds

I can't see it. I cross my eyes again
but those 3-D pictures pop in instead of out.

Before visiting my mother-in-law in the nursing home
I'd dab on an extra dose of sandalwood oil
at the jugulars and wrists, thinking its repetition
like a thin yellow flashlight beam
might pierce the rubble of her memory and vision,
her soft body's implosion into the wheelchair,
lunch's whipped potatoes,
and the incrementally simpler conversations
she held with the nameless stranger I'd incrementally become.

An aromatic postcard (I thought) from Indian jungles,
freshening the wreckage of Philadelphia, the Depression,
the War, three marriages, one daughter who shared her name -
Big Peg and Little Peg,
a prelude, perhaps, to the now hastening
conflation, confusion, dissolution.

If it worked she showed no sign
but chatted in cheerful, shrinking circles,
unpegged from the names and times
I thought she ought to have,
for reasons I can no longer recall.

What happens to the dead
and those who've died out of our lives -
ex-lovers, old teachers, neighbors who've moved,
friends we drop and don't see again?

Perhaps they hang around the margins of our vision
as bright or dark spots in the corners of our eyes.
Perhaps they become Bobble Head dolls
in the backs of cars that drive behind us
or supporting characters in movies we never watch,
listings in phone books on pages we don't turn to,
members of studio audiences of late-night talk shows,
laughing invisible but familiar in the dark.

Maybe they're bugs under rocks we walk past,
happier than we imagine they'd be.
They might be starfish drifting beneath waves,
quietly shifting on ocean floors,
or sea horses, or clouds of brine shrimp or plankton,
in tranquil communion with all those others,
all my dead and yours.