Winged faces look up, stare me down,
take flight in imagination
with melancholy, wistful eyes.
Peering from carved slabs
leaning every-which-way after centuries
of frost and rain, mica-freckled
stone sparkles in sunlight, and perpetual
care is as fragile as memory.
Dour, quaint, they gaze from a dark
and distant place where right and wrong
could be smelled and touched, roads
were dust or mud and icicles grew
in winter outhouses. Still, it’s hard to see
a world before the dawn of electric light
and television, hot showers, and air
conditioning as more than a clever fiction.
Far from the scent of freshly shoveled
soil, names and bookended dates
remember lives cut short or ripened
with years and storied deeds.
How strange to feel distance thin when reading
that children fall through ice and drown,
lightning stops the heart, and young mothers
die in childbirth with stillborn babes.
Lots of life survives in the old
burying ground, echoing fates
of my friends and family,
enlivening the moment with chance,
fear and hope as past bleeds into future,
dissolves to a present where grief and joy
are solvents of centuries as I confront
my own effigy, wings yet unfurled.
