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Actually, it was published last year, but this weekend, I finally got a copy of the book it was published in, Poetry.com's best poetry of 2002. I thought I'd share it with my second family, DU!
CEMETERY MEMORIES
I can still see you standing there
Balanced on your favorite tombstone
(the circular-shaped purple marble,
mixed with the sunlight,
casting strange shadows on your
arms and face; As I looked out the
window of my father's and your mother's house,
You'd pretend to be Batman
Flying Chopper One (One Adam Twelve!,
you'd shout), It took you twelve more years
to fall into that hole.
Along the way, did you see how we would
listen to the Brady Bunch singing
"Home on the Range", with the scratches
on the worn-out record making the songs
slip and slide?
Did you hear our laughter as we ran through
the tiny country cemetery with the overhanging
elm tree, making up stories about the faded
names on the smooth, gray, worn-down stones?
Did you smell your mother's roast beef as she
made your favorite for Easter dinner?
(Later, you and your brothers laughing at me
as I choked on the rotten-egg sulfur water I
never could get used to).
Did you hear the Wubba Wubba Monster as it
hovered ever closer,
waiting for its time to show you
what your own imagination looked like?
And did you hear the dirt falling into
your grave, Its thick, earth-smelling clumps
filling up your final room
with somber tones of nature's orchestra,
as I watched
from the window
of the tiny, cream-colored church?
My youngest stepbrother died in 1988 in a car accident, at the age of 18. When my dad and stepmom were first married, they lived in my stepmom's house out in the country; there was a tiny, old cemetery right next to it that we used to play in. He was buried in the cemetery behind a tiny, old church in the village my stepmom was raised in, we watched them fill in the grave from the windows of the church basement, where we had a gathering after the funeral. It took me many years to be able to write this poem, but once I was ready and felt it coming to the surface and sat down to write, it just seemed to flow naturally. I wanted to show the contrast between the cemetery we'd played in and the one he'd be buried in a little more than ten years later. I've found that, with writing, you have to be ready and it can't be forced. You'll feel it when it is ready, I can't explain it except to say that you know when it is.
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