Ghost and Grounding

I don't have those dreams anymore
where my father appears in the bedroom
doorway, in another version of his favorite
bathrobe: gold-embroidered, or woven
of sunflower petals, or flecked with brown
like coarse-ground mustard. In those dreams
he just stands motionless, watching. Or,
I like to think, watching over. Over me, my small
children in the same bed with me, while the world
around us rocks in the aftershock of a quake. 
Those children are grown now, fled to their own 
portion of time, or space. I'm still here, fixed to 
the hollow my body has made. The years have made it 
deeper;  this body, still a body of grief and unknowing.