Pandemic: While home is an outbreak, we pass a graveyard

                                          --

This country has a way of forgetting

the dead. Of making me forget, too.

I read about other places

where dead are visited and headstones washed,

places where altars bring them home to us

once a year or always. Growing up, I heard

not to breathe passing graveyards – or what?

No one ever said.  I’ve only stopped doing it

this year. I don’t know where my three

gone grandparents are, not their remains.

The fourth wants to be ash on the ocean.

I have never been to the grave of someone

I knew and we have no place in our homes

for our dead. They find places to come anyway,

out and around, Chloe chuckling at me on a bus

over the University Bridge, Kim-An by my desk

or driving out of town. Amy. Mark and Ed, Nadine.

                                           --

          We have no idea what to do with the bodies.

          They end up chemical in corners by the highway

          with the soft feet of caretakers, the held breath

          of passing children. It is most of a forgetting.

                                           --

We left the dead behind to come here. My people,

too. A decade on foot, guns and graves at our backs,

graves at our feet, who visits them?

I haven’t yet. And the tall northern villagers who

came on steamships, the bodies, flowers, songs

now an ocean away. My dead lie trailside and across

the salt ocean, becoming lands I have never walked.

Don’t have the right names for. Hope to tread,

and will tread with reverence. Will breathe

when I pass, and will pause. Will trust the hands I feel

at my back, dozens, almost solid where

they make contact. Of course we have broken

how to be with death when the old earth

of their bodies is too far to fall to. Nowhere

to kneel and keen. Sometimes no names to

call, or the wrong words to call them in. Losses

we can’t name in the language they happened.

Today, I am scared for names I know, loss I’m afraid

to become fluent in. Under which tender bodies,

whose palms I have pressed to my lips, graves may open.

But this week, after months of blue fingertips,

there is just enough warmth in the damp spring

to leave the window open a breath at night

and wake up every morning, when we do wake up,

to birdsong.