This Weekend Something Changed

My wife's sister
changed this weekend
from spirit into flesh.
Then they took
the flesh away
somewhere in California.

The haunting of a brother-in-law
is like the haunting of a stranger,
a disorder of ambiguous memory,
breaking out old fantasies
from rare spoken words years ago.

Maybe she did not become a spirit.
Maybe the whole code is backwards.
Spirit is not something one becomes
but something one once was.

Maybe she was looking away
with her face to the wall,
distracted by
who knows what visions.