The Feast of All Souls

The dead visited this morning: sisters,
parents, aunts and uncles, old professors
and friends—faces so vivid they again
appeared in my room through memory’s lens.

Did families stage a yard sale later
in the Catholic cemetery on Common,
a table set up in the center, orange water
cooler in view? But I am mistaken.

It’s All Souls Day when people assemble
to clean the crumbling graves and to honor
their dead, whose remnant bones sometimes tumble
from ancient crypts, although their souls have soared

like skeins of starlings, whose sudden flight
in sunlight dyes wings a shimmer of white.