After the séance failed,
they dug him up,

begged him to atone,
wheeled him into the shed,

and made us enter
one by one--

oldest to youngest--
to speak to our dead.

I was only a kid.
I did not know

I would be made to talk
or walk in alone.

My sister shuffled out
shaking her head,

converting some truth from him.
I crept in.

They gave him a cigarette
by dangling it

on the edge of his mouth.
It would have stayed

if the lips were wet
from the reawaken.

His skin--
what was left--

flaky and gray
under the bulb

swaying from the wooden beam
like a life regretted and taken.

A twitching finger (or was it my eye?)
and bags under lids were shaken--

what wasn't already skeletal,
apocryphal, skeptical.

He would have told me all
if only I could formulate

and conjugate
the language of wraiths.

His eyes one X then another,
his mouth in an O,

still waiting to answer
what I would never ask.