Pioneer cemetery in Edinboro, PA
by Brett Rutherford
Names last, dates fade, deeds disappear.
Try if you will to read these stones —
earth clots around inscriptions,
moss rubs like moist eraser.
Even in best light you cannot read
their rhymes of what heavens they earned
or paid that others should think so.
Stonemason’s script rubs down to worm-lines,
elegant esses and effs are mere wrinkles.
Would anyone know if the stones were swapped,
if pious spinster’s stone became confused
with an outcast wench’s marker,
if brides and grooms and stillborn babes
exchanged their names and families,
half-breed with minister,
hermit with midwife?
What a terrible stew at Resurrection
if these stones were needed,
carried like credit cards
to the last communion!
Even the wind, and wind-borne waters,
shorn of the lake and incontinent clouds
work bald forgetfulness in granite,
sandstone erased, slate shorn by frost and thaw.
Easy to read BORN.
Born is everywhere.
Born as we all are,
but when is gradually erased.
Zeros and eights and nines
curve into shallow depressions,
sevens and ones to cuneiform,
thin lines and gashes.
Easy to read DIED
but isn’t that obvious?
Death dates and Aetat ages
wink out in wind-rub.
A few are blank,
carved and waiting
for sleepers who never came.
(Fought in a war —
no body was found —
went to the city —
ran for a freight train —
or just plain never died?)
Names. The names linger.
Eye leaps from letter to letter,
fills in the biblical
and well-known names.
The sculpted angels are armless now,
the stones once faced
with weeping-willow carvings
are horizontal.
Some have been propped back up
on broken pediments
with bolts and metal braces.
Do they toss in their sleep?
Do stones fly up
like lumpy pillows,
tilt down
to shade unhappy eyes?
I too would turn
if line by line
and page by page
the universe erased me!
