The cemetery road isn’t build for efficiency
To chart the minimal path
From location
To destination
It’s a haphazard spaghetti tangle up

 and over the gentle hills
Too narrow for any kind of speed
Not like we want to drive quickly
But the practical fact is
We can’t
Even if we did
I look at the people who work here
And there is something different

 about them
We don’t do this much
So we look to you to tell us
Where to go
And how far
How to be
And for how long
I scan the line sketched and re-sketched
By the tops of the trees
When her voice comes to me
Like the angel: why?
Do you look for the living
Among the dead?
I read that on some South Pacific island
The people made life sized models
Of cargo planes
Out of sticks and palm leaves
And held parades
Long after the war had ended
And the airstrip was abandoned
And the supply flights had stopped
Like a kind of funeral played over and over
Rehearsing the forms
From memory
Maybe so they wouldn’t forget
Why did such grace fall to us?
Literally
From the endless ocean sky?
As God gives
So also he
Takes
We are wound
A long string of cars like hair
Through a lover’s arms and fingers
And we are poured
Out to the larger roads less

 suited for remembrance
Not built for contemplation
As so many tiny rivers
Down into the stretching sand