This next poem is actually about a trip I made to a cemetery
in Nogales.
It's a Jewish cemetery that basically
buries the dead of the Jews of Nogales
and it's called Border Cemetery.
The flower covered broken sidewalk greets me
at the border cemetery.
We are each a territory of one.
The slow memories of place and mood
dissolve the mass of gathered family.
Chanting ritual to wake us, we wait the coming conversations.
They spiral and pierce us.
The chosen one heavily perfumed taciturn
leads us to the backyard of her youth,
banishes the contempt between the loving
families that lie here.
The living continue the myth of their blood surrender
to a world passed by interstates, malls,
and a political geography more definitive than
any reservation, any ocean.
Drowsily, we listen to the witness
in the night wishing again to dance with a childhood friend.
Plump cheek, curly haired, telling simple narratives.
Her only inheritance wrapped in hand-me-down langer.
She was loved in the fashion of modern office masculinity
marked by the savvy slights of counted silence.
Beginning a repeated spiritual destruction,
welcome to the empty banquet with preordained eloquence.
She cannot leave this smooth antique neighborhood
of the dead.
She stares at the overgrown garden
when the guests have gone, knowing
she will be buried with family alone, battered for having
kept this barren lookout.