"Visiting The Graves"
All day we travel from bed to bed,
our children clutching homemade bouquets
of tulips and jonquils, hyacinth,
handfuls of yellow salad from the fields.
In Pennsylvania County our dead face east,
my great grandfather and his sons
facing what is now a stranger's farm.
One great uncle chose a separate hill, an absence
in the only photograph.
Under the big oak we fumble for his name
and the names of sisters scattered like coins.
But here is my father, near the stone
we watched him weep beside for 20 years.
And my mother beside him, the greenest slab of grass.
By horse it was hours to Franklin County,
to Liberty Christian Church where her mother lies.
The children squabble in the car,
roll on the velvet slope of the churchyard, pout or laugh
as we point out the gap in the mountain where her mother's
grave is underwater.
The lake laughing, the house, the house
still standing like a tooth.
We tell them how we picked huckleberries from the yard,
tell them what a huckleberry is, but the oldest
can't keep straight who's still alive.
The smallest wants her flowers back, who can blame them?
This far from home, tired of trying
to climb a tree of bones,
they fall asleep halfway down the road,
and we fall silent too,
who were taught to remember and return.
Our sister is driving, I'm in the back.
The sky before us, a broken field of cloud.
[APPLAUSE]