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Column 583

My Dead

Intro by Ted Kooser
05.22.2016

At some moment every day I call up a mem­o­ry of one or anoth­er of my fam­i­ly mem­bers who have passed on, so I was espe­cial­ly tak­en with this poem by Tim Nolan, who lives in Min­neso­ta. His forth­com­ing book is The Field, (New Rivers Press, Octo­ber, 2016).

My Dead

They grow in number all the time
The cat, the Mother, the Father
The grandparents, aunts, and uncles

Those I knew well and hardly at all
My best friend from when I was ten
The guy who sat with me in the back

Of the class where the tall kids lived
Bill the Shoemaker from Lyndale Avenue
The Irish poet with rounded handwriting

They live in The Land of Echo, The Land
Of Reverb, and I hear them between
The notes of the birds, the plash of the wave

On the smooth rocks. They show up
When I think of them, as if they always
Are waiting for me to remember

I drive by their empty houses
I put on their old sweaters and caps
I wear their wristwatches and spend

Their money. So now I'm in six places
At once—if not eighteen or twenty
So many places to be thinking of them

Strange how quiet they are with their presence
So humble in the low song they sing
Not expecting that anyone will listen

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Poem copyright ©2015 by Tim Nolan, "My Dead," (The New Republic, August 14, 2014). Poem reprinted by permission of Tim Nolan and the publisher.  
Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.