I Ask My Sister's Ghost to Play a Game of Cribbage
       

I set up the good board with the mahogany pegs,
warm the bourbon and stir in cider.

We sit between woven peacocks on the Persian rug,
the cards blur and plume as I shuffle them.

You want to know about sex in the afterlife?
We've never spoken of the body, or its pleasures,

and I don't want to speak of them now.
It's better than poetry, she tells me anyway,

but worse than cheap whiskey.
Better than addiction, but worse than denial.

She completes the crib and we begin the count.
In a peacock's beak, a sprig of wheat shakes in braided wind.

Better than a royal flush, she smiles, laying her cards between us
but nothing like shooting the moon.

As she moves her pegs up the board I can't help picturing the mechanics
of making love without the body—

maybe the slow deliverance of shadows fusing in a field
at dusk. Or perhaps it's more abstract—

a pair of red squares merging in a white plane, the straight lines breaking,
lacing into eights, settling into a single, momentary sphere.

It's true there are times I've merged without touching.
When I lie down in the meadow where we spread your ashes, I tell her,

it's as if the world seeps into me, plaits me to the blue-eyed grass,
unfurls a vine around my throat.

She lowers her cards, picks at the carpet's warp.
Well, she asks, do you like it?

Like what? I answer, ashamed I can't follow.
That urgency. Death's breath on your neck,

finding, even there, a current of kindness,
the faint scent of hyssop.

And though the grip nearly splits me,
I realize, for the first time, that I do.

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Copyright © 2020 Ben Gucciardi All rights reserved
from Southern Indiana Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission