Maybe I need an excuse
to come here.  The dog needs
a walk, and during the day
nothing is half as haunted
as night. There’s evidence—
the dead have been reading,
not nineteenth century novels
not personal letters or sweepstakes
rules, but the Northwest Arkansas
Times.  The pages are all over
the graves.  Not the section called “Living,”
not the horoscopes, certainly not the future
which no longer concerns them,
but the wants ads, all those vacancies:
rooms with views, sublets,
yard sales, must-sees
and have-to-sells. Possibilities
of one sort or another.
Are they planning on coming back?
Or simply curious
about the places that have opened
up now that they are gone?  I wonder—
is there such a thing as the Reincarnation
Times, a deity writing the personals:

​

Middle-aged couple in Des Moines
looking for eleventh-hour child,
orphans a plus
all expenses paid.
Lonely heart takes a beating,
apply within.

​

My dog runs among the papers, spooked
by the way they ride the wind, rustle
and snag on the tilting wire stands
that once held ribbons
and wreaths.  She flushes a cardinal
and it lands in a nearby cedar,
a red gash in the wood, watching.

There are families here,
but none of mine. My father,
who art in Virginia, a drifter
reduced to ash.
I threw him to the wind
five years ago, from a rusted bridge
over the Rappahannock.  He’s drifting, still.
He won’t stay put, certainly not
beneath the stone that bears his name
in Orlean, in the family plot
next to his sister, the one he didn’t mean
to kill.  He was nine, lifting
his father’s shotgun.  She was seven,
and simply walking up the stairs

when the bullet met her, one step below
the landing.

And so—is this why I’m here—
to summon my father, former journalist,
to a cemetery in Arkansas to read the paper?
He won’t look for a job; he never did.
For once he’s not going to comment
on the headlines, give a lecture
about the whims of the gods, the cost
of hubris, or the Real Reasons
for the War Between the States.
He will concern himself, finally, with
what he might need, beginning with minutiae,
the useless and marvelous he can now afford:
Hermes Typewriter (letter X sticks,
otherwise excellent condition).
Printing press (needs work, runs good).
Trunk of Confederate Bonds (like new!)
And best of all, a 1912 Remington rifle
(never fired).  He can barely bring
himself to lift it.  It’s heavy and I have
to help.  It’s all right, I say, I’m right
behind you.  He closes his eyes,
squeezes the trigger.  The sound
that should have been thunder
is no more than a harmless click,
the most beautiful of vacancies,
the empty chamber.

​

No child will fall. The bird
watches from the tree, a red ribbon
with wings, ready to disappear.
It won’t.
It stirs; it stays,
sings.

​

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