Reverence

for Kaveh

The flag face of decency is emblazoned in High Anglican—

curly curves of marble-dirtied fingernails,

family names losing distinction, grouped like obedient

cedar of Lebanon gets grouped:

tall ones in the back in a row.

Grandmother's saintly legs ballooned

from outliving all her known relations,

then she was lowered

into a wet pit.

Second husbands are buried next to first wives:

the black Kodachrome arrows on their white

wedding pictures bull's eyes

a gravedigger's map.

Under fussy rhododendrons he's turned away

from the second wife.

Acid-loving soil.

Wedge of earth

eating away between them like mud walls of the most ordinary,

they had the ordinary love

long before the telephone

but only after

the hourglass-voided nexus of contract, proper

length of mourning had been measured

in threat-knots on barn rope—

swung out, skirts lift, rafter climbs, dropped down.

Alone is plain and simple

wear and tear on the cord.

They kissed a few times before the morning of their own funerals.

Speed of the hands is over

oldened bags of body shape

shifted urges to insert themselves

into one last territory

before night.

Paddling silently across the cemetery swamp

you pull up alongside the sinking pilings:

the family name

came from what might as well have been

the other side of the spinning world.

A region of sand and relative fortune,

bells hung and tinkle from shamed necks—

reckonings as ridiculous as we now sing upward

into the best-guessed vicinity of the

ganglionic spirit.

When the unwed died in several large pieces in desert tufts

you went to wrap him in linen—

There are those who go right into the earth,

and those who take up space when they're dead.

Source: during (Gaspereau Press, 2008)