Simple enough distinction. The dead
always seated, the living standing by.
What complicates is how they're linked,
each couple holding hands in such
a definite, tender way it's easy to imagine
love streaming through the veins,
tingling in the fingertips. And not just that.
Standing here among the excavated tombs
in fields of snaky asphodels, you gravitate
towards some threshold, the singular step
between the now and then of everything
you ever thought was possible in life and death.
Even in those monuments that time's
been savage with and left as shadowy iconography,
there seems to be, however faintly, some purpose
flowing in the graininess of stone hating annulment, endings of any kind.
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