Open my front door, cross the crab-grass lawn and narrow street,
Crest Avenue, as though it was the edge of the living world,
hop the chain link fence beneath dark green cypress,
scamper over the broad emerald meadows
then called the 17th and 11th fairways
and there we'd find piles of extra dirt that no longer fit
into freshly dug graves.
Games to play: dirt clod wars (with the occasional pebble or chunk
of sod); find the oldest gravemarker (something from the 1880's);
jump across a newly interned resident; hide and seek; peek-a-BOO.
we'd find the dimpled white balls on our explorations and pretend
they were eggs from some alien creature
or maybe a seagull
before polishing them up like alabaster gems
to try to sell them back to the notorious cheapskates who strode the fairways
in awful tartan slacks and the reek of cigars.
Especially as dusk snuck in with the rolling fog
and the fog horn lowed its sonorous warning
like a giant metronome, every minute,
to meandering ships that might wander too close to the hidden shore,
we'd stare upwards as the tip of the flagpole disappeared,
and nearby the sodium lampposts would flare a futile yellow into the gloom,
while pigeons cooed their lost love songs
amid the old, dripping wet, grey pines. There
above the bones and cherry wood coffins
our voices might drop into silence
but we could still breathe and laugh
as though tomorrow held no meaning
which, come to think of it,
it didn't much. On occasion we'd vacate
while the hearse circled the road and women
in black strode clutching bouquets, kneeling, falling away.
We didn't have tomorrow
to worry about, even when the marker
didn't go past a month: Here Lies
someone we didn't know
gone before tomorrow
as though it never happened.
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