At a Jewish Cemetery in Pittsburgh

Someone is looking for us.

I sensed it earlier at the creek

while floating on my back, and again

on Route 8 near Brookline.

So we’ve detoured to this hillside

eroding and crazy with markers.

We’re looking for row mm or nn

or something like that.

I lug the baby; my wife runs ahead.

This neighborhood knows her–

she passes so easily between stones.

She finds the grave, her father

dead ten years now. In the time it takes

to say kaddish the sun’s dropped.

I set down my son

and he crawls in the dimness,

pulling himself up on the headstone.

How delicately he fingers the marble.

Quickly he rounds its corner. Vanishes.

I’m thinking: grass, stone, quiet–

then babbling from another world.

Copyright Credit: "At a Jewish Cemetery in Pittsburgh" from Iconoscope: New and Selected Poems, by Peter Oresick, © 2015. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.