Thoughts at the Grave

I am considering a stone.
Even alone I feel I am in another performance.
Even the near world is distant.

Certain graves have no headstone, no name,
no dates, no epitaph. Only a good boulder
hauled over with a backhoe
and marked with a twisted windchime.

Who is it down there?
In the softening box, your discarded limbs,
the unstrung toy with ruthless hair
morphing to wild blue phlox scattered above you.
But for some artfully yellowed dentures

fallen back into the gritty skull
the color is gone as any Grecian statue’s now—
as a seashell far from the sea,

I think a ghost follows me—it’s not you. It’s Nothing.
No-body. I coax her now, here,
where end of summer light sleeps
dappled on cots of ground ivy leaves
and ferns sleep awake the border at a
lain-down life—

Some stones are better uncarved, I think.
Uneaten by tool. Even Rodin must have sensed it.
How when a face emerged out of nothing
in his obsessive work, that what was hidden
was lost in the stone, once it was carved into something.
How, when a face looks out,
staring from a pedestal, it’s stuck seeing.

Rodin, whose final act was a half-finished bust
of an impatient Pope—how he threw his apron down in rage
at the suggestions of using photographs

and limped down the pontifical steps
with tears in his eyes
and died soon after—all that intense staring he did

at spiral snail shells,
at the gothic cathedrals in France,
bombed to rubble, back to the mute stone—

all the observing, that worked its way
into what seemed so like a woman’s thigh,
or the vein in a furrowed brow—

but even wind and water
carve stone with their howling gaze.

I see them at the brook, across the yard from here,
where I walk from the grave—I see them
working, working the stone,
pouring into a concaved nothing—

and everyone knows even a slow drop of water
will eventually
create madness, and change,

on a surface—consciousness
which cuts as it goes
paths of solitude into new rooms

and wakes us up, and finds a mirror
and thinks: this is my face.
This is my face.
And it once looked upon yours.