Visiting My Own Grave
       

The plot next door has complex etchings, flowers,
crawling vines that intertwine like figures
on an ancient urn, while mine is squat and square:
a simple granite marker, my name, the dates.
It feels like something brought me here, but I,
not knowing what to do, just steal some flowers
from the nicer, neighboring plot to praise my memory
(my thanks to Daniel Johns, d. 1990).
I say a dead prayer. For whom? I'm not quite sure.
I'm not—or wasn't—a man who went to church.
I never believed in the way believers do.
But here I am the same, though shadow, though shade.
I stand unseen, unheard, above the spot
where my body rots in a very plain box.
When I came back, I wandered the earth for a while.
My spirit did, I should say. And when I say
"the earth," I really mean my neighborhood.
You know—the street I lived on, the grocery store.
I walked the aisles touching things I bought
back then and noticed how the bright clear light
of hanging halogens made each tomato
burst with a red more vibrant than anything
I'd seen before—back when I was alive.
That's the only beauty when you're dead:
the things you knew, ignored, and now have lost.
Tomatoes, bottles gleaming in piles of garbage,
the shades of pearl in a pool of motor oil.
The wind picks up and cuts between the graves.
A figure stands a hundred yards away
framed in the dark between two concrete angels.
There is no moon, no stars. It's impossible
to tell a mourner from a ghost—

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Copyright © 2019 Chad Abushanab All rights reserved
from The Last Visit
Autumn House Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission