The Generation Before

Sometimes Iım sure I can see them
staring through the frozen trees from the street
up to my apartment as it stood perfectly
white decades ago. They are not my ancestors

but they are the ancestry of this place,
undead historians who quietly recount
a lineage shrugged for better jobs, for
the moving van, the earthquake.

Iıve seen them before,
or perhaps I've seen relatives
following me from city to city,
lips grown from bared tree roots
to grins crabapple red,
the faces hanging like branches
waiting to reclaim their past,
like dangling fragments
of a story.

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