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?

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.

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

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.

I think I need ballast.
I'm floating away.
Grounded objects are shrinking
at an alarming rate.
Brontosaurs become puppies,
oceans slosh in my teacup,
I step over gravel
that was mountains, moons.
The Peloponnesian Wars
rage in my Cheerios,
the kings and queens of England
doze, tucked in my mailbox.

I been working this dentist chair for three thousand years
three thousand plus some.
Shakespeare's teeth, they were like rubies,
rubies and razor blades,
tricky to work on.
Freakin' Socrates was a mess,
never flossed, 
whole mouth soft like a swamp, and smelled like one.
I liked Annie Oakley. 
She never used Novocain, didn't care, didn't flinch.
I spent seventeen years on the Russian army
while they stalked Napoleon, working in shifts,
between the field and my chair,
put braces on the bunch of 'em,

faded prayer flags over the porch
stir in faint new jersey breeze
steady trill of crickets in the sycamores and rhododendra
over variorum roar of traffic shifting axes with the changing light 
red green red green red green
(green really a variant of blue, an aid they say to the color blind)
the whishhhhh of tires on asphalt
sometimes the deeper throated rumble of motorcycle or big bone rattling of truck
or surprisingly metallic clatter of jet overhead to newark from newark
(hope they make it)