Ghost Smoke

I. The mourning song

Grandma had secrets of the holy ghost
always dreaming someone was going to die

next day, washing a dead body
singing:

wet when God sends us
wet when God takes us back


II. Sandstone

The dead lived in sandstone
under our hills. On wet summer mornings

their smoke would come up in the yard.
I worried about ghosts in the smoke

but grandma would say,
"They have to live somewhere."

A professor told me once in a Zen-kinda way that the answer was in the stone. I've re-written this poem half a dozen times, but I've never gotten any closer to it.