The bleached limestone stones are contesting for which can be last to forgotten. You can tell by the angle of leaning —the death tilt of death is the scoring— whose letters have scattered their meaning. Others here are still secrets unspooling in memorial talk of the widows planting stories with their baskets of flowers. Barely yet have the oak roots been nudging at these stones, barely yet have the hours piled on hours, to give hint of the knowing. Soon the stories will slow, slow, like a top at the end of a twirl, like a sentence trailing off. Sins above, sins below, trailing off, in a kind of repentance playing out, knee to knee, in the digging. In the dusk all the white heads are bobbing. A stone stands unflowered at the end of a family plot. It is prodding with a shadow-like arm to contend for the stories of unplanted flowers, for the flowering of unspoken stories. Through the plot and the deepening pall comes the fingertip tap of a root. At the end of remembrance is falling.
Published in Snakeskin Ezine, 2019, printed here with revisions
