Ghosts And You

Words are condensation on the window
between the maple and my chair -

breakfast dishes form a road from the table
to the sink, moraines on the counter top.

I miss the walks we took for cigarettes,
to the corner store, for fries from the drive-in -

I miss the baby steps and the way September
shed heat, worms in rain, stories with coffee.

I regret first snowfall, leaves clicking polka
in the hedge, the way dreams migrated

south and never returned. I rue twenty thousand
rhymes grown in wine petri dishes,

knocked senseless until they became poems,
anecdotes, lies, the sounds of an accordion

played long past midnight - in immigrant time,
for breakfast, in the milk of gunshots,

dressed in the flesh of uniforms, reciting
the differences between, with falling bomb sentences.