Cemetery

When it’s cold on lonely days
I like to walk to the cemetery.
Put footsteps in the clean white snow
to all the stones unvisited.
Walk over the dead,
toes against the ground above their hair and fingernails,
never stop growing.
Read the names and dates:
she would be my mother’s age,
and he my father’s age.
But they are gone now.

There is a man who visits his wife.
He is here most every day that I am.
He cries; his tears freeze when they hit the granite
and his shoes leave geometric patterns in the snow
like a four year-old drew the top of a castle
over and over again.
Sometimes he brings yellow roses
and sometimes cut out photographs
and sometimes nothing at all.

On Valentine’s Day he writes her a letter:
-Dear Sophie- I think it says
-Don’t forget to buy eggs.
Please pick up my dry-cleaning.
I love you- I think it says.
Pretend she’s not gone.

Try to think he really loved her
try to believe in love again,
but you’ve turned love into
tiny ants under magnifying glasses
burnt to death in summer romance
little corpses on linen blankets.

The same cars drive by every day:
blue pickup trucks, silver sports cars
yellow bugs and dirty green station wagons.
-There’s the girl who walks with the dead- they think
I find a hole, six feet deep, and bury you inside
-There’s the girl who walks with the dead-