On this day, believers
fix a meal
for the visiting dead.
I wonder, Daddy,
what foods your spirit
might enjoy.
Perhaps the inner organs of animals
that you fixed for yourself:
kidneys, sweetbreads, tripe,
or calves' brains that you fed us
as kids and called them "turkeypine."
I remember the chalky, buttery texture.
I remember finding out with disgust
that we had been eating brains.

Perhaps you'd savor some of the foods
you cut from your diet to try to control
your drinking: sausage, butter.
Perhaps you'd relish a smoke.
I wonder, if we were honest,
would you prefer a tub of booze?
Beer, wine, gin, bourbon, mixed drinks-
I never knew your preferences in alcohol,
except to know that they
were catholic in the extreme.

How about a syringe of Demerol
or an hour of access
to the locked drug cabinet
at the hospital
where you played doctor?

How do drugs affect the spirit
after death?

Perhaps I should insist
on setting out a healthy meal
of rice and beans, with generous
portions of leafy greens.
How about a holiday meal,
turkey with two kinds of stuffing,
plenty of skin in your portion,
cranberry sauce, creamed onions,
sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie.
I wonder, should I pick
a menu I could cook myself.
That would limit my materials:
eggs, bacon by the pound,
some pasty tofu mix,
steamed carrots, sliced cucumbers.

What could I truly
offer you with love?
Not much, and yet the image
comes to mind so clear:
the day after you died
I bought two green apples
at a roadside stand, the first
most perfect fat green apples
I ever saw. I drove them
through the golden, still
New England fall and set them
in my apartment
on a silver tray.

I never could take a bite,
and now I see
that they were my first offering
to you as a spirit
when we could no longer
break bread together
in this world.
From the tree that now
grows in my yard,
I offer you another green apple,
not so perfect,
but, from flower to fruit,
all mine.