I wield imagination’s oldest right
and summon up the dead for the first time,
I watch for their faces, anticipate their steps,
though I know that dead is dead and gone.
It’s time to take my head in hand
and say: Poor Yorick, where’s your ignorance,
where’s your blind faith, where’s your innocence,
your wait-and-see, your spirit poised
between the unproved and the proven truth?
I believed in their betrayal, they didn’t merit names,
since weeds sway on their unknown graves
and the crows mock them, and the snowflakes scoff
—but Yorick, all this bore false witness.
Tickets to the afterlife are paid
by our collective memory.
Uncertain coinage. Every day
some dead man’s banished from eternity.
I see eternity more clearly now:
how we give it, how we strip it from
the so-called traitor—how
his name dies alongside of him.
We must give the dead due weight,
our power over them is what we make it:
this court cannot convene at night,
the judge presiding can’t be naked.
The earth surges—those once turned to earth
rise up, clod by clod, a fistful at a time;
they leave silence behind, return to names,
to the nation’s memory, to wreaths and cheers.
Where is my power over words?
Words fallen to a tear’s depths,
words words not meant to conquer death,
dead record, like a photo with its magnesium flash.
I can’t even restore them to half-breath,
a Sisyphus assigned to the hell of poetry.
They come to us. Sharp as diamonds,
they pass along shop windows lit in front,
along the windowpanes of cozy houses,
along rose-colored glasses, along the glass
of hearts and brains, quietly cutting.