Ghost Light (Poems 1990-1994), by Eric Basso
Asylum Arts, Paradise, Ca.
169 pp.

I am dead. My fingers and hands are sore from what I thought I was. So sore that when the dead came to me I knew them by name. One, in particular, who poured his blood into mine and called my blessings out upon a grave Oak tree in Pike County, Mississippi.

I looked down at myself. My death had come. I was a naive woman who carried her pain in her shoulders. Nobody taught me that in Mississippi---how to bend my bones erectly, know my bones like I knew my Eve.

As I turned the pages of Basso, I was surprised to find the man who poured his blood into mine and Big Mama Patterson fanning herself with the sharpness of a chicken feather.

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