When You Die Can I Have Your Number?   

Then if any of your long lost friends who don’t know, call,
I can tell them She’s dead! She’s dead! How can my daughter
be so macabre? It runs in the family. That line’s part of our lore.
This number’s been ours for 50 years!  – Half. A. Century.
Have I ever told her about exchanges? About alphanumerics,   
when words in front of the numbers were code for where home was?

Way, way before she was born, the 873 she wants to hold onto
was the upper west side — the Trafalgar I got when I married her father
who grew up MOnument in Morningside Heights. Single,
straight from the heartland, I was a CIrcle in midtown. When the phone rang,
and I picked up to my CApital-2 mother in St. Paul, I always knew
exactly where at home she was: next to the planter across from the wall-mounted
clock set ten minutes ahead because we were a late family. Then, poof!
CApital 2 disappeared. All the words disappeared leaving only
strings of lonely numbers which told us nothing. What does it say

about me I couldn’t wait to pass on to my daughter the old story
my mother and I never stopped laughing over?  How before
my 2nd cousin Siggy’s wake, outside Peterson’s Funeral Home
we heard her daughter preparing her daughters for the open casket.
She’ll look like she’s sleeping but she’s not, she’s dead.
The good news is she’s already up there with Jesus!  White
hair ribbons like contrails, they ran circles around Siggy, chanting
she’s dead, she’s dead, the she a half tone higher than the dead.

About my mother’s open casket — instructions were precise: white silk          
blouse; wedding ring; Fire and Ice on her lips. I miss the drift of white
tissue on her vanity, each sheet imprinted with a kiss, each kiss
fainter and fainter until her lips wouldn’t smudge the edge 
of a glass. Once I sent her a clip from a beauty column – How
Do I Make My Lipstick Last Forever When Nothing Else Does? My mother
was in a coma for days. We were all in a circle around her bed singing hymns
and right when we got to Just as I am, I come, I come, she woke up and died.

My husband, who believed in nothing afterward, said Beethoven
was his god, said that supernal music right here, right now,
was the beginning and the end.  Not for him any quantum
entanglements. Then how would he explain his voice that morning,
clear as a camp bugle —Are you awake? I rolled over into his hollow
still beside me and yelled I TOLD you so! Which was me
saying okay, now I know we’ll be holding ghost-hands,   
or you’ll be a drop of water flicking my eyelashes                                   
when your spitting image grandson cannonballs so deep into the pool
you can see the water rush in to fill the place his body’s been.

So, no. I don’t believe, like my mother, I’ll see her face again. But maybe
we’ll all be holding hands with everyone we ever loved, or wanted to love,
or wanted to love us. Maybe the afterlife is like some hypnogogic state
where all our floating ghosts and souls live inside our memories,
which is what I say to my daughter who makes me promise
I’ll haunt her if I get the chance.

-- Upstreet