The ghost beside me shudders and shakes and swears,
clutching her purse in crabbed old claws,
wracked and wrecked with something old and cold and fatal
I’m grateful I’m not permitted to know.
There’s a tiny something knotted in her hair,
a kink, a snag, a snarled ball trapped in her snakes,
and with a start I realize it’s a tiny baby bird,
killed before it ever opened its eyes,
the blue marbles on its odd featherless head
as still and sightless as the lady’s own,
rolled back in her head, placebos, placeholders,
seeing naught now but memories and the future.