Twelve Days
—for Ann Lauterbach
Night fades angels on Cemetery Hill and the town
seasonally wakes; even trailers
suddenly articulate: elaborate alphabets of colored
glass-studded wire. Religions of stone
reduced to wattage, shorthand—replicated stars, brightly
diminished kinds. Why inject
such history into light? Each night the pale
procession of angels illegible in ascent, each morning
the town’s confrontation with vanishing. Preservation
destroys it. Chemical rinse on the rock paintings
ate from each zebra the delicate
spindle of legs. The sustained
can’t hold us. The winter the snow wouldn’t
stop falling the world was reduced
to repetition until spring thaw muted it to ice cold
warming lakes. Wild sheep
drank there. So how erase
the narrative of regret? All this marble
determination to house
drawers of ash, a room encrypted with light.
Luminarias all up the drives, coffined electric candles
blessing the way out; why does consolation
come as duplication, the same instinct
lined up the hill as monuments
to recognition and grief? Only the names break
the pattern—age uncarves
each letter, each
visible absence. History survives
only so long; winged angels of chalk
pour finally toward intent. All this
ritual alteration of landmarks, poinsettias
racked on each grave, and none the answer to how
ward off the night. Vines compete
for the marrow of trees winter-thin to make room
for the lesser light. Climbing the hill to the founders’ crypt, tiers
of the exemplary sound the world to progress
through a regimen of flowers, of marking
stages of grief as if the night weren’t posed
as a range of questions, some
so dark there’s no priority to the prior, nothing
to remember but the present as a gift of cool
vague absence, a thin place, a moment’s
narrow cave between pulse beats of blinking
color downtown, a code flashing to the nightsky
again and again a single letter, an afterimage
invisible by dawn.