Reunion a New Yorker Poem

I love this poem courtesy of The New Yorker

Reunion
by Jeffrey Skinner
September 1, 2008

Why do you keep returning,
alive, able to walk and gesture
as you could not at the end,
your movements sketchy, more holographic
than warm? Thanksgiving dinner
with all the relatives and I alone
with the suspicion I cannot speak:
You should be elsewhere.

Heavy drinking, as always. The newest baby
passed around like a contagious glow.
Same teasing of the strong,
same muffled terror of the uncertain.

All the while you, at the head of
the table like a signal carried by
a frayed wire—there, gone, there—
raising a glass to toast,
the rim never touching your lips.