Those last two weeks of August before we too are married, before we
recognize another soul in town, we meet them walking here at evening,
nod, and smile hello. Until we don't awhile, then never again. Small rabbits
tensely watch us pass from the long uncut grass between headstones
where they believe they are safe. They have gone to school with stones to
learn patience and motionlessness. Rapidly graying, dissolving into one
substance with the dusk, they are so still they tremble. They are troubled
by a fear whose source they have no way of comprehending, combined
with the equally incomprehensible delight of children playing hide-and-
seek as it gets dark, sooner, enormously, with every passing day, and they
become aware in waves of being older than a person they were only
yesterday. While the trees sway soundlessly high overhead, the breeze
and first visible stars seem, if anything, younger. Mothers stand in yellow
kitchen windows pretending to listen to fathers quietly, inconsequentially
droning on behind them in the deepening evening, even when they are
the voices of men no longer alive. They say things like "Any day above
ground is a good day..." And what would they have known about that?
The mothers stand completely still, they will never turn around. Standing
with his back to a tree, barely breathing, a boy wonders if he is going to
be the one abruptly struck down from above, swiftly carried aloft over the
first soft lights of town by huge wings, never to be seen again, and decides
that he probably won't, and for a minute is perfectly happy.
Mt. Feake Cemetery, 1999
- Franz Wright