When I stay at my mom’s I sleep on the bed in her office and wake up to look at her bulletin board each morning. Her board is covered in family pictures (including youngest’s most Churchillian one when he was little – big forehead) as well as notes, political buttons and other miscellany from her life.
She also as several poems that she loves scattered among the flotsam including the following:
Don’t Make Friends With the Dead
By Richard Stansberger
They end up coming over every morning
with a flicker and a pop
as soon as you step into the shower.
Then all day long you follow them around
asking questions like a dumb little brother.
They go from room to room for their own reasons.
Handel loves the soap operas and the way
the silver sounds when he dumps out the drawers.
Gogal is fascinated by the rock collection.
and Otto III studies the scrolls of light
unfolding on the floor.
But the dead bore easily, get blurry. and you
end up following them down the basement stairs
where they disappear through a back wall
and you suddenly notice your barefeet
cold in the dirt of the root cellar.
From “The Yellow Shoe Poets: Selected Poems 1964-1999” edited by George Garrett (Louisiana State University Press: 232 pp.)
Reflections from the Hinterland 
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