The cemetery is imagined,
as is the weeping, filtered
by black umbrellas.
Couples make love
in the surrounding forest,
covering each others’ mouths
out of respect for the jealous,
peaceable ghosts.
The lovers come and go
on a strict (if unacknowledged) schedule.
And poets with writer’s block,
gathering husks and shells and
abandoned verbs, pocketing them
for some future rendezvous with their
mirrored Aphrodites,
rainy mothers of god.
The headstone is imagined,
or dreamed, paper flowers
hiding birth- and death-dates,
the lawn stretched tight as a
seminarian’s sheet, gentling down
to the mausoleum’s marble jaw,
chiaroscuro yawn to entice a stranger.