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Keeping up with the Dead

Houdini, a lifelong foe of spiritualism, promised his wife,
a believer, that if he were wrong and there was an afterlife
he would come back and tell her.

All around, they multiply, push off from barrooms, lie down
on railroad tracks, wreck automobiles.

They tango out, fondling silk casket liners, their faces
settled into rictus grins. I pretend not to notice.

I say the dead don’t overrun my street.  I heal from the outside-
in, a puncture wound of loss.  Until I can’t escape.

The crowd’s a laminate on the inside of my sunglasses, stacked
like cordwood in my mind’s backlot.

Post mortem loved ones lack something.
They don’t remember after work, to pick up milk

or make it to the kid’s homeroom.  Worse.
They’ll never lay a gauze of fingers on a sunburned arm

or urge the sweaty hair back from my forehead
with cool hands.  Deceased they’re useless as Houdini

who, although he promised, once he passed
could never make the sign.

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