Fabulae

In the Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague

In the Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague The dead here, impacted in their ascent like molars in a small jaw, and the living who skit about in the bone light of trying to say something to them and to each other— effaced of name, broken, jammed-in, the headstones after all say nothing; they bite into the footpath, a bad perforation between worlds. We leave pebbles on this heave of graves, leave stones that are like boils or the heads of tacks or bells to charm the natives stay down, stay down I think the dead are not more holy. How do we know they in their inverted world trail stars for us? I would say something irreverent about someone buried here, if I knew her— I think the dead say nothing anyway; it is too noisy with this din of gray alphabet, this empty trail of thought balloon and my own radioactive stone— a falsehood, an embarrassment, dot of a question mark, something inarticulate like a baby who cries out at night just to see if its own voice is there 37 ...