poem: A weekly poem, read by the author.

Other People

By Peter Campion
Posted Tuesday, March 25, 2003, at 11:41 AM ET

Listen to Peter Campion reading this poem.

In the dream where the dead return but never speak
they sauntered up the lawn: my mother's father
and our neighbor who was shot in the robbery.

Maple branches twisting between the houses
scattered sun on their skin. And it didn't feel
like an afterlife: bathed in silver shade

and tennis shirts, they were just two other people
with those stippled faces mere will had not remembered.
The sunrise, when birdcries from the roof

shattered the airshaft, was catastrophe.
Then minutes afterwards, I was standing
pulling the chalky paste across my teeth.

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Peter Campion is the author of a collection of poems, Other People. He teaches at Washington College in Maryland.
Click here to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.To submit poetry to Slate, send up to five poems and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Robert Pinsky, Slate Magazine, Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA, 02215.
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