We still celebrate

my Grandmother’s birthday

by frying a slab of fish,

smothering flounder

in Texas Pete,

chicken in Sweet Baby Ray’s,

someone puts on Marvin,

someone says I love you.

How can we lift enough

smoke to reach you?

Our cookout has the blues,

I can’t tell you why

I walk old country roads

looking for your spirit.

I hear you speaking

near the river,

where the water

slows against rocks.

My mother says

the best thing to do

is get addicted to God.

But I write from inside my body,

what’s the price of being

obsessed with the dead?

No ghost abandoned,

you mostly

speak of wind.

Someone put on Marvin,

someone say I love you.

In my purple bedroom,

I’ve heard a woman

long dead speak of gardens,

tomatoes, squash,

white tobacco flowers, lilies

are pretty, but they are weeds.

By the elementary school

we used to pick sweet potatoes,

played games like

that’s my car,

that’s my house.

The lands murmurs

in our hands,

where to grow

the biggest melons,

the place where June Bug

finally died,

what’s so sweet

must be sacred.

We mended the horses

rubbed an old mane

until it was time,

you prepare

an old man for death

by reminding him

of his legs, of his work,

I can still see your silhouette

in the window like a kiss

to a father long gone.

In the kitchen where

I haven’t stepped-in today,

I can hear you

among the spoons

and butter knives

in the drawer.

What do you think

when you see my loneliness?

Living ghost? I must learn

the language of rain

to speak to plants

and the Genesis of how seed

turns to flower.