The Unmarked Graves at Grandview Cemetery
“Longing
Not that I want to be a god or a hero.
Just to change into a tree, to grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
– Czesław Miłosz, “Notes”
I.
The day moon is thin,
its center windowpane-clear.
Pale needlebeds crevice
the weathered asphalt path,
pool beneath lodgepole pines.
In the trees’ distant crowns,
shafts of light are turning.
The empty sandstone plaques
stand mostly in pairs—
lids of
closed eyes.
Clouds drag their shoulders across the glade,
their soft-edged forms
like figures seen
through water.
Silence itself is a body
of horseshoe crabs
concealing
copper-blue blood.
II.
Lodgepoles carry their days
in their soft white stomachs—
their soft white stomachs
wet with rain.
Their roots reach out
and the earth reaches over.
My grandmother stood like that:
Summers in Rhode Island
while evenings darkened and grew thin.
Her feet planted
where water turns
to sand.
Her hands folded.
Her head
a box of light.
If a word is an object,
it grows in the mouth.
Daffodil buds tender my tongue, heavy
at their heads.
III.
Sunlight splinters itself
against the moon, the stone,
the lodgepole bark
like rain against glass.
Thickets of daffodils
crowd the path,
tilting their pendular heads.
I walk—
parallax
sets the far mountains moving.
Wind drives west
and the lodgepoles lurch east
breath
pulls opposite the blood.
The grave markers drift.
The needlebeds ripple.
And the moon so taut, it might be
humming.
ξ
“The Unmarked Graves at Grandview Cemetery" first appeared in The Pinch.
Daniel Schonning’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Orion Magazine, The Yale Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. His poem, “Aleph with all, all with Aleph,” was selected by judge Cyrus Cassells as winner of Crazyhorse's 2020 Lynda Hull Memorial Prize. He works and writes in Colorado.
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