Series: Highgate Cemetery Poems

In this cemetery, the English ivy does all the work of grief, circling, knotting, twisting, persistent as a scavenger. It listens, a crowd of one, hanging on every engraved word. As vines reach the sky, their five-lobed leaves give way to a simpler shape, a sort of teardrop, & the umbels drip nectar. The fact that the berries are poisonous to humans is incidental, I’m sure, & the plant can’t help how invasive it’s become overseas, pulling down natives with no natural defenses against such clinging. Bindwood, they call it here. Lovestone. Grief’s greenest eraser, wearing holes in every last will & testament & scrawling in the breach its own cursive signature.

Six fresh oranges
in the short grass
on the grave of the founder
of an import/export company,
born in Aleppo.
A toddler strains against
his mother’s grip: Ball!
How to explain
the Silk
Road, the souk,
the once-unassailable
hospitality of merchants?
How to explain torture,
a feast of agonies called
the magic carpet?
A cricket plays his hit single.
Ball. Ball.
Such longing!
In Syria, they say
a narrow spot can contain
a thousand friends.

for RR

How does one lay out a dog for burial?
Do it wrong and its ghost will circle
endlessly, unable to lie down.

*

Live dogs aren’t permitted in the cemetery.
We look for their stone snouts among the angels.

*

Has anyone considered that dogs may not want us
with them in heaven?
That we would frighten the wolves?

*

A cemetery is the last refuge of invisible friends.
Here’s someone with a map to celebrity gravesites.

*

Trees at Highgate need not fear the lifted hind leg.
They go wild, permitted
every extravagance except death.

*

I write these notes six weeks later
in a silence greater than any in all London,
sitting in the darkness,
trusting my faithful pen to find the way.

The stone idols of our ancestors
lie face-down across the graves
they were made to watch over.
Lips worn whistle-thin
by the corrosive breath of engines
seek relief in the soil, where perhaps
the live wires of nematodes
might revive them, or ivy cover them
with feathers that actually move.

Only a few feet down the crowd awaits,
growing more anonymous by the year.
Perhaps they can reach those winter trees
through dissolution, like stalactites.
They shape the darkness
in their own image: a mask of dirt,
a vessel, a full breast.

My too-grave stone cannot stand.
Its bull’s-eye cross is tired of target duty.

Stones are such somnolent creatures —
they know nothing of the pleasures of flight.

It could topple at any time, in any wind.
There’s no telling which breath will be its last.

It rides the turf like the ship at Sutton Hoo,
waiting for the sky to cave in.

I thought I was rid of such becalming
when I traded my corpse for fire’s fey wings.

Magpies have been observed engaging in elaborate social rituals, possibly including the expression of grief.
—Wikipedia

So those are magpies!
They do look acquisitive.
They hover over
the graves like eyebrows
or second thoughts, tails
held decorously aloft.
Each time I raise the camera
they take flight—proof
they’re not spirits
but among the quick.
They are, in their black-
&-white way, shiny.
They remind me of
our shared mission:
to rob the dead.
Their chatter offers
a refuge from this refuge
where even the weed
eater keens, though
among their own kind,
blessed with sufficient wit
to comprehend loss,
they’re said to indulge
in rituals of grief.
I try counting them:
one, one, one.

At some point in every horror film
comes the line: It’s alive!
Is this the way the dead feel
when we disturb their rest with
our roots & our pickaxes, our squirming
purple larvae & our blind snouts?
We are the zero in their bones,
that slick thick marrow, mother
of blood. We are their unlucky
rabbits’ feet, the throw of their dice.
We creep & crawl. We erupt,
dangerous as magma.
Someday the sun will bring us
all together, living & dead, in one
molten paroxysm, but until then we can meet
only in the briefest of spasms, & are listed
together in the credits for moan, rattle
& almost imperceptible sigh.