Unmarked graves

Like unsigned poems, are everywhere in everything, the center
of a sentence unsighed the chains of a hoop still rattling long after
the ball has passed through on its perfect arc. We half-see
in the place we pass through—a haunting that is only a space
where something else has lived, still resonant. Whitman said
to look for him beneath our feet in the dust rising. To believe
that we are made of Whitman dust, in dusk, stars flickering. We
carry the ache of our own loss like someone searching for the keys
he is holding in his fist or the glasses still perched upon his head.

Loose in a boy’s limbs, sheened in sweat, his birth. On a path a mile
or so off main street, behind the church, under the apple tree
you find each name your mother has forgotten will forget: the first
few moments at the end of a story when it starts to change and
shift the leaves above your head, alight, alive, marked by the wind.