Michael Healy
Island in Milton Cemetery Pond

Even a satellite can record the oddity.

From back then, from a swampy promontory
jutting into a peaceful pond that lulls
the dead into staying asleep.

To let us know how close
we might’ve gotten: a chunk of Eden
floats near the headstones; a green clearing
hardly can dull its own brightness,
its centricity rubbing away at the secrecy
and subtlety of the surrounding shrubs.

Nowadays I could stomp or swim across the pond,
but crossing the invisible line that maintains
that principality as being within and against this one
would disrespect the sanctity that comes down
from the sun and centers this place,
keeps my heart inside my head.

And beneath the sanctity, even the short blades of grass
cast shadows and the center would move
and who anyway wants to be in the center.

The black iron of the cemetery gate might come
from those shadows. In any case,
I have to return beyond the gates of the cemetery
back to that other universe, the one containing
all the time from that day back then until this day,
two moments demonstrating how memory springs into action
and folds your life over and over into a lilting accordion song.
I have been so folded and therefore taste the sting and am alive.

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #3: Summer 2010, Volume 2 Number 1