Poem Begun on a Map of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Headlights in daylight,
I scrawl in the blank space
by the Old Croton Aqueduct, where I stand
looking down on the graves,
the hearse, the procession of headlights.
I freeze this wintry scene.
I fold the map and hike off its edge,
through sere fields toward home.
Something grey and gothic
lopes across the landscape,
big as a wolf—a coyote.
He spots me and stops. He waits for me
where the trail turns.
I’m not one to see ghosts,
but what if
this is my brother
come to me in a coat of fur,
to chase me back to the graveyard
to meditate on the luck
that divided us years ago.
No, this is a coyote
in daylight, and he waits with teeth.
I grab a stick and back up. I shadow
a man and his leashed dog
to the road. I keep
the dead tucked in my pocket.
* * * * *
August
Meteors streak and shower
in the sky over Truro, ink
shot through with glitter,
the gaudiness of that other world
expressed in stars, in fragments
of disintegrating bodies.
Extravagant season,
nearly spent.
In daylight, I lose myself in the scrubby hills
and stumble on a graveyard.
The bodies here fail quietly.
I sink like a worn-out verb,
like that hard worker, said.
I think I slept against a stone because
I come to with light streaming out of me,
rings flashing in late sun.
Somewhere along here,
August is expiring.
The traffic hums, the copse of pine.
The bees, they sound almost human.