Smoke Tree

It’s raining again,
and Lucy, my daughter home from college for the summer,
is wearing her dead


grandmother’s powder blue raincoat. I use the yellow-handled
screwdriver
from the tackle box of tools my dead father-in-law gave me


as a wedding gift
to open a gallon of paint. In my dead father’s bible
with its spine cracked


I find Christ’s words, “Let the dead bury their dead:
but go thou
and preach the kingdom of God.” I eat oatmeal cooked with raisins


and diced Gala apples
from a clear glass bowl, the same my dead mother-in-law
once ate from.


The dead are gone, but they remain with us, shelter, aid,
instruct,
and feed us. They are as the smoke tree’s billowing filaments, ghostly


cotton candy, pink smoke
from the underground fire now hidden from us among the million
roots that still clutch


the dirt. Go thou and preach the sunlight upon smoke blossoms.
The wind
shakes them. They stay with us for this short season, but shall return


each year
more abundantly than the last. The cars downshift, go slow
past the blooming


smoke tree on Rainbow Drive, side street whose myriad cracks have been filled
with lines and loops
of black tar, erratic freehand spelling out grace and wonder


in indecipherable
ideograms that I must learn before I can begin to speak
again with the living.