Jay Udall

Names and dates repeat themselves like mantras
for permanence. Cut Flowers Will Be Removed
After Seven Days. The green floor yields
a harvest of lasting plastic colors,
headstones and footstones growing confused—
everywhere I tread feels like trespass,
soft grass giving to my weight, I’m floating
over crumbling houses, hollowing ground.
Up the path, under arching branches
and raven profanities, a rectangle
of new sod grows crisp and pale in the dry
high desert heat: no one goes without our help.
Now photographic likenesses emblazoned
on ceramic disks, fixed to gray granite—
a monument to a couple.
Between and slightly below them, the image
of Pierre, beloved poodle—buried here?
Or banished for the lack of a soul?
At the bottom, chiseled in cursive:
We Will Meet Again on the Rainbow Bridge.
Pretty words to cast a spell on space-time,
the ruinous body, reeling mind.
Yet there’s something undeniable
in these faces—a disarming warmth,
generosity, remains of the fire
that first pulled them from their separate skins
flickering up from clay and nothingness.
Here was a faltering shelter that seemed
to hold the stars in place even as they burned
toward their cold. Here a bridge into the earth,
its wide circuits, the expanding air.