The Dead Only Visit the Crazy

The dead only visit the crazy

© Valerie Bridgeman

April 7, 2012

DRAFT

The dead only visit those of us crazy

enough to answer them back when they talk—

the living who stop to acknowledge

that business did not end because a car

wrapped itself around a tree, 
metal and wood fusing, pinning passengers

against branches as 90-mile-a-hour prayers

screamed last goodbyes

and the dead note that we forget to mention—

that until that very moment of crush and crash,

that tree had held its ground for decades,

maybe centuries, before door handles and windshield

picked apart its limbs, causing sod

to loosen its grip on roots

You died young; at least that is the story we

tell about you as we recount the times

you irritated us with your antics.

stories too numerous, but we try

to catalog them against the

fact that you are not here to

defend yourself

But you, looking over my shoulder,

try to correct our details, you want

to be remembered rightly

yet you have been dead long enough now

to know that the living prefer our lies.

the truth hurts our teeth,

and we devise legends over against the brutality

of details about when you walked home, barefoot

because you were too drunk to remember

where you left your shoes

or we recoil for the harsh and bitter words you

once used to cuss out the whole lot of us,

and walked away triumphant

while we struggled to figure out

what the next thing out of our mouths

should be, how we ought to answer you

and you mocked us with your wit—

cigarette hanging from the corner of your lips,

black from years of gin and smoking

you mock us still, even as you waver

in ethereal spaces between this world

and another that we do not know

me, the one listening to dead people talking,

hear you as you explain that death

is not what we imagined

you tell me we would do well

to pay attention to our children and

the games they play,

to hear the conversations

they hold with imaginary friends

to watch the way they stare

out into the night, heads cocked,

ears up, face glistening in the moonlight

you tell me—as I struggle to hear

your mother’s story about the day you were born—

that we ignore the children who can teach us

much about the dead and about the living

you tell me they have come, our children,

fresh from the place where the newly born

greet the newly dead as they pass

one another on their way

you, dead as dead can be, love talking to me

and I have not figured out how not to be crazy

to listen to truth as you speak

from beyond the grave

© Valerie Bridgeman

April 7, 2012


Edited/updated May 10, 2012

DRAFT