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Grave Tour
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
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grave Tour I was hoping for some contact with the natives, the ones who built these sepulchral impediments, an iron pianist whose music issues from a hole in the head, a big marble ball. This is how they honor their dead even when the ground’s too frozen to make a dent, the fauna dependent on handouts, a stake become a snowman’s spine, a hardy folk kaput nonetheless after a long winter’s whooping, an even longer spring when the world declares its need for psychotherapy. Mortality is the subject of which I sing and know nothing about, it’s always someone else’s who won’t return my calls, who never writes except homilies in frost. The silver tray drops in the foyer, Mother must be revived with rosewater, the flowers are left to go scummy in the vase, none go back until they can forget or go back not to or some fuzzy combination of the above. The house grows quiet as an upside-down mug, the ghost ship circumnavigates the globe, the comet disappears for 57 years. But new, raunchier advocates are on the way to take the place of those vanished in the mist or seemingly imploded to bits so one night a single ghostly thumb may print itself upon your brow not unlike a lily, you too readied for departure into the abyss that is always changing and yet a steady nothingness behind the cheesesteaks of Philadelphia, the needle of Seattle, New York City’s addled rush, inevitable, lush, sometimes grave as a kiss between friends who would like to be so much more. ...