Poetry March 2008 | issue 387

What The Dead Don't Need

by Faith Shearin

FAITH SHEARIN has had jobs teaching high-school English, interviewing elk hunters, and reading tea leaves. She is the author of a book of poems titled The Owl Question (Utah State University Press), and her second book, The Empty House, is forthcoming from Word Press. She and her family divide their time between Baltimore, Maryland, and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

No need for shoes, of course, or closets full of empty
dresses. No need for the shade of trees or the approval
of parents and friends. They don’t care about the objects
of this world: a new computer, a house overlooking
the sea. The place they occupy may or may not contain
a window to all they’ve left behind. We, the living, think
of them without knowing who or what they have become.
Ghosts? Dust? Butterflies? Wind? Other mysteries —
puberty, sex, childbirth — are the business of life, and
anyone can tell their story. On the matter of death: only
a closed box and the silence of earth or ashes. When my
daughter was small, my disappearance behind a blanket
or curtain seemed permanent. How could I exist if
I was not visible? When I returned, she was grateful:
laughter and kisses, her hand on the roots of my hair.