Don’t Make Friends With the Dead By Richard Stansberger

They end up coming over every morning,

with a flicker and pop

as soon as you step into the shower.

Then all day long you follow them around

asking questions like a dumb little brother.

They go from room to room for their own reasons.

Handel loves the soap operas and the way

the silver sounds when he dumps out the drawers.

Gogol is fascinated by the rock collection,

and Otto III studies the scrolls of light

unfolding on the floor.

But the dead bore easily, get blurry, and you

end up following them down the basement stairs

where they disappear through a back wall

and you suddenly notice your bare feet

cold in the dirt of the root cellar.

From “The Yellow Shoe Poets: Selected Poems 1964-1999,” edited by George Garrett (Louisana State University Press: 232 pp., $39.95)