In the company of the dead
I am in privacy.
The sense of it fills me quietly
like a well, to just below the brim,
forms a cool blanket
like the snow I stepped through
seems to become the air itself,
so that a person walking
through the mundane world
outside the gate of this little cemetery
looks as remote as she would
from many leagues beneath the sea,
whose solid, implacable surface
conceals from her the world
I have discovered.
There is nothing in this place
but listening.
If I spoke for hours about
whatever came to mind,
the dead would listen just as fully
as they do now to my silence.
Before such listening, trifles fly away.
Thus it seems in the moment of passing
each of them, reserved and effusive alike
learned some final lesson
that no amount of neglect
or disrespect will shake,
though by damaging their domain
we would seem to damage the best in ourselves.
Not even by fully and forever
forgetting them
could we counter what they know
and always will.
Perhaps the beginnings of that knowledge
left on their faces an expression
of dreamy surprise, or abject terror
before those who love them closed
their eyes and mouths
but what they realised in the end,
they will not say.
Only listen.