Ed McMahon comes to me in a dream, or rather

I come up to him and ask if he will take a selfie

with me, for my dad, I say, who is your biggest fan.

He is annoyed by the request, I mean he looks

annoyed (I am not omniscient), and in the dream

I remember he has been dead for fifteen years, my dad

for a year-and-a-half, and also he is having dinner

at a swanky Italian restaurant with sidewalk seating

and a checkered tablecloth. But he rises anyway

 

to humor me, and I drape my arm around his neck,

and we smile for the phone. Only I never press

the shutter button. Can we try again? I ask,

but the former TV host vehemently shakes his head in refusal,

says, If you weren’t holding a snow cone you could have done it

in one take, and I look down at my right hand, and indeed

I have been holding a snow cone. I don’t feel as if

I have agency anymore: my hand is near to me

 

but unfamiliar, like that section of the Appalachian Trail

a woman lost sight of when she wandered off to pee

in some overgrowth; she kept a journal for weeks

but died underneath the watchful stars only a few yards 

from a white blaze. I know I am not getting another shot.

Between us there is nothing doing, a thing

my southern dad used to say. Why was it Ed McMahon

at that table and not him? I look for signs everywhere:

in water, on land, in constellations.