What Seems to Seem to Them

Dead family members come and knock
and pull and murmur – gently furrowed brows
bespeak their mild distress – as if annoyed that I had not
yet guessed what seems to seem to them a patent mission –
the sort of shake and tug you’d give a toddler who expects a hug
from every stranger: no, they seem to want to say: go the other way.

My father has recovered from his Alzheimer’s,
my brother is no longer AIDS-gaunt, covered with bed sores,
my mother doesn’t hack that last death rattle cough: her black eye
gotten from a fall from bed has vanished utterly –
why do they, healed as they are now, so sputter at me –
what exactly am I doing wrong?
Perhaps it hasn’t much to do with doing wrong,

but with their longing to belong to me again.
They seem to know they drift –
one day will disappear –
a matter not of if, but when.

.