TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

When we lose people we love, it’s hard to let go. We want them to still be here. We want to hold them, to talk to them, to ask them questions we didn’t think to ask when they were alive. We want the relationship to continue.

I’ve had deceased loved ones visit me in dreams. I have friends who believe their loved ones sent them signs of their presence — a hummingbird, a blue butterfly, a cardinal. Or, they found a feather, a coin, or a special object that they associated with that person, or they suddenly smelled their perfume, and it felt like they were saying, “I’m here. I’m still with you.” I even have a dear friend who missed a call from her late father’s cell phone, even though it was sitting in a drawer somewhere miles away, with no battery charge.

How to explain that? I can’t. Skeptics might chalk it up to coincidences, or glitches. But to me, it seems like the best kind of haunting: when someone is gone, physically, from this world but not gone from you. The word haunt originally meant “to visit often” and “to continually seek the company of”; only later did it evolve into its current, unsettling meaning. I like knowing the root, because it reminds me that not every “haunting” must be scary, or menacing.

Maybe it’s possible to have a welcome haunting. To open ourselves up to visitors, and to seek their company, however they are able to make themselves known. Seeing — or even seeking out — signs from deceased loved ones helps people who are grieving feel more connected and less alone.

Today’s poem sees these signs as a way of staying connected. It creates an active, vivid present between the deceased and the speaker. It invites that possibility in our lives.

Missing
by Mary Morris

Saw my brother in a wolf, in wildflowers
climate change, bobcats, javelina, and praying
mantis, lilac scent, laughter. Saw him howling

himself back onto the sidewalk of his life
before he lay his body in front of a bus, drunk.
I don’t know what risk is really, to be 
that bare, that happy with ruin.

The dead won’t give their secrets away.
Occasionally in dreams we receive 
a postcard with an unknown stamp
from a place so remote there is no dirt.

Or bees. No grass. Only air and water.
A blue postcard of a boat unmoored
or single oar afloat. On the back, a message
so faint, or a palimpsest, layer upon
layer upon, illegible.

On anniversaries of their departures
they blow kisses in wind from behind
mountains or sing in disguise through
gale or bird. Then silence. Waif thin.

Let the twilight come. Dusk. Its darker
bright, its mission with night hawk, wolves
and great horned owls, its ancient fables

in constellations. Letters to the evening
of missing brothers, children, husbands
gone north, and our own two parents
with their creation stories, us.

"Missing" by Mary Morris from LATE SELF-PORTRAITS © 2022 Mary Morris. Used by permission of Michigan State University Press.