in a rock well, whirlpooling 
out a pinhole at the granite base—emptying 
the way New York City empties the Ashokan
with flushing, showers, with waste and wanting,
 
I keep the old towns—foundations of homes,
stores, churches—visible in summer’s drought.
Places we ate, chatted, made love, prayed,
before the 1905 project—before bulldozers
and floods for a reservoir in the womb-like basin
of the Catskills—for a city I’d never see.
 
I am that voluptuous basin
filled with fish, feeding eagles, bear,
climbing stone walls, spilling over, 
traversing aqueducts, tunnels,
rocking driftwood, marooned boats,
flowing from the cellar
of the house where I stored jams, cured meats,
the rooms where I lived with a husband, four babies
 
—before tweed suits with money bargained, bought,
moved Grandma and the rest of the cemetery
to higher ground.
 
A marker at water’s edge
says we lived here … 
the towns of Brown’s Station, Olive City,
Broadhead’s Bridge, Ashton.
 
I am water. The keeper.
                        

This morning’s walk
the length of Vincent Lane
across the main road
into the cemetery, where
I go to weed the flowers
at my mother’s gravesite,
a funeral procession.
 
Thirty or more cars lined along 
the entranceway—sun hats, umbrellas
suits and flowers, bodies merging
to attend the end.
 
I do not have the verve to
disturb this last prayer and penance.
 
Turn back.
 
I think about how he said,
“Don’t be disappointed in me,” meaning
because I can’t love you
or anyone again,
because I have been buried 
in a sarcophagus of loss and
prefer to live with ghosts,
because I don’t want to fail again,
because your disappointment 
will remind me how disappointed I am
in myself.
 
In my silent stride home, I say
We all land in this final hiding place,
guarding inert bones,
a bloodless heart
with an eternal yearning
to make it beat again.