Someone snuck in a cemetery. A break
in the line of sandstone apartments
like a tone blip in the city plan. Surrounded
on all three sides by the high-rise living—
the whole yard the size of a house, but thick
with blooming dark grass and the pale whites
of tree foliage. The centre gate is locked off
and wrangles of weed truss the tall iron fence.
Inside, the gravestones are edged black
with granite moss and hold a calm slant,
they line the ground, side by side, and some
so close they seem to be one split block.
Someone’s decision to bury the coffins
vertically. They said it would triple capacity;
that it was in keeping with the skyscraping
pitch of urban planning (‘Drop ‘em in
feet first… it’ll save space.’) Those too ‘proper’
to be cremated; too ‘proud’ to end up
on the outskirts in the communal graveyard.
Someone snuck in a cemetary, into the heart
of a city gridded with slender cross-streets
and municipal pressures. Bodies standing up
cool in their boxes. They must’ve slid them in
like a flower stem led down a tall jar. And tall
runs of whiteweed rise up the fence, through
the black, wrought gate latched to a sole iron
pin. The grass is strewn with wraps of strange flowers,
thrown over the fence by a visiting relative, or anyone
whose heart the city has warmed with stone.
The ground holds to the cold like the joining
of bone. At night, the apartment windows flick on
from all three sides, they throw down twisted squares
of light and bring the flora junk and top stones
out of mute dark. In summer, when the green rim
of a moon arcs the night, the tall weeds lean out
from the fence and dip their tips to the warm pavement.