Fog like grey cotton
Crack of dawn, choking streetlights
Anti-mystery
poem
Huron Cemetery Poems VIII
May 15th, 2018
Unknown
Bits of broken tombstone surround the tree of life, jagged little reminders that all monuments someday crack and crumble.
A speck-like spider falls from the tree of life onto my pale hand. Before it has a chance to find its own way home, I send it to the land of wet grasses on a gust of self-generated wind. I have never cared for spiders, however minuscule.
I count no less than twenty shards of gravestone and wonder if the tree of life is to blame. The tree of life, grown so large from all the now-quiet bodies if hovers over while under the bone-infested ground, the roots of life seek water.
I spy no faces upon the tree of life’s cracked and ornery skin. I only spy black ants and sick-yellow lichens.
Are the faces then underground with the roots or perhaps higher up on the trunk, well above eye-level, spied only by wandering drones or a telescoping eye from a nearby window? Are the faces then in the branches, obscured by oblique leaves?
Perhaps the tree of life has no faces at all…
Perhaps the tree of life is just a dis-envisaged voice repeating so slowly, “So happy now you’ve gone.”
And what then for us still left to hear?
What new lessons do we have to share?
Huron Cemetery Poems VII
May 10th, 2018
MANY UNMARKED GRAVES
IN THIS AREA
WILLIAM E. CONNELLY
SURVEY OF 1895-1896
In Kansas City, we finally lost the Spring. We finally lost rebirth. The birds now arrive too late. There is an ambulance, a fire truck, a police car, a sleeping man, a city bus, a casino, and authentic Mexican food. I mistook for a woman carrying a baby a woman carrying her coat and shoes. Bare feet traipse through the cemetery grass and not one eye open for green snakes in the sun. Google says they don’t bite and I have long forgotten what my grandmother once told me about the legless. For years, the rumor in our family was that we were touched by Cherokee blood. Had my genome sequenced over Christmas and we were all made to forget many things grandma once told us about us. Remembered then that history can always be erased. History is a dandelion’s seed borne high upon a lost Spring wind. History is bone and word and point of view. My body ages and aches because of history and a lack of magic mushrooms. Walking across the curved earth our feet gather dust and pain but, after a while, we recall how to traverse over sharp objects and how to respect the dirt. In Kansas City, we leap from cold to hot and shift with the quickness from slight to shot. I dreamed I needed a history to claim a home. But what can a history be without a home to first anchor it? Grass grows where it’s allowed until it remembers its history. Nature doesn’t take sides. History does. Dandelions grow where they are needed and do you see how many dandelions there are? In the daytime, we walk over sharp, broken bones and our thick-soled shoes provide such sweet relief from constant hurt and filth but, in the end, they completely wreck our posture and we find ourselves lost between Winter and Summer, reading through our travel diaries and seeking trained hands to help us stand up straight again.
Anne Boyer. Read Her.
They know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, they’ll go to it laughing
I.
Who are these sight-starved and smiling madman enthralled by Death?
Blind captains forever mistaking the fires of Hell for the light of the Sun.
II.
I wonder if the First Nations remained optimistic about their future as promises evaporated, leaving behind this salted land; the pale white crust over brown soil.
We recapitulate because it is impossible to see the actions of invisible hands.
III.
Death is the son of Night and Darkness, helicopter parents. To this day, Death never sleeps alone.
Foul captains always forget that their only reward is a participation trophy.
Huron Cemetery Poems VI
May 7th, 2018
The Van Fossens (Caroline M., Ruth, Charles H.)
On my way to the cemetery,
I saw three men help lift
an inebriated woman to her feet.
A block later, I heard the ambulance cry.
On my way to the cemetery,
I passed an Oculista’s office,
which I mistook for an Occultista.
I considered stopping in for a look-see.
No bones about it:
The sensual world is incomplete.
That’s why the hidden world’s call
is irresistable to so very many.
Two people hug behind the library.
I jump to my feet because I sat on an anthill.
How do I explain to my boss
all the ants that I’m bringing back with me?
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/1062025/memorial-search?firstName=&lastName=Van+fossen
Choose Well
I am walking
on the sidewalk
in a blue button-up,
too-tight loafers on my feet,
behind a young girl
with cat ears on her head and
an orange balloon
tied to her overstuffed purse.
She bounces and
she waves and
she sings to the cars
driving up and
down Minnesota Avenue.
I stay ten steps behind
simply waiting,
watching,
for that balloon
to lift her up and
away.
Instead, she tries
to duck into a Subway,
but that balloon
catches on the door.
She chops at it with her hand,
then she looks me in the eye,
asks me what the fuck I’m staring at.
“I thought you might float away.”
“Some day I might,” she says and
then she walks inside
to get herself a sandwich
made just the way she likes.
Haiku for Amusement over Wisdom
In the yard I hear
A sad trilling sound; a cat
Slowly kills a bird
Huron Cemetery Poems (V)
April 29, 2018
LITTLE NEROT
AGED 3 MONTHS
God, how I need the sun now.
I’m so weary of being indoors.
I’ve stopped wearing socks and shoes to the office.
I need to feel the worms, the shattered glass, the broken backs underneath my soft, bare feet.
I’ve disinvited myself to endless meetings, too.
Instead, I’ve taken up with sunshine,
and the the vines that run up the trees,
and the tiny graves of infant humans,
and the old ways of telling time, of measuring progress,
of being a body.
I hear you scoff from an open window, “The old ways?! The old ways?!”
But you’re not thinking old enough.
You gotta get deeper.
You gotta remember the dead,
remember the sun.
You gotta remember that hot light falling across your fat, tiny toes.
You gotta feel it, that hot light.
You gotta really feel it.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/16982009/little-nerot
Huron Cemetery Poems (IV)
April 27th, 2018
HARRIET BUTLER
1837 – 1870
AND INFANT DAUGHTER
AUG – SEPT. 1870
I wonder if she killed you
and I wonder if the others’ tears
fed the city that would soon
spring up around you.
You never saw
how their sadness
turned to brick and mortar
used to hold hopes for a new life,
used to hold off a slow death,
used to hold in the last breaths
of a jaywalker’s world.
Now, you rest between two trees.
In the summer, their leaves shade you from white heat.
Two birds fight in the distance.
Oh, maybe they’re flirting.
It can be so hard to label natural inclinations.
It’s a problem to try to understand love at all
when most graves have such a common tale to tell.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/16887899/harriet-butler