Bingo Cemetery, Green Mountains, Vermont
A graveyard marks the trailhead
we take almost daily in all weather.
More often than not, on one of the graves
a bouquet of fresh flowers appears, chrysanthemums
I think, a stranger’s morning prayers made manifest.
Some of these carved stones, large like granite ships,
are over a hundred years old. We move
up the trail as easy as rain. Once I fell
in love with the hills and crests of another
range of mountains. In those peaks I lost
my late husband’s mind, soon to follow was his body
by his own hand. But this range can hold
buckets and buckets of snow, enough to freeze
the pain or at least keep it from thawing
without warning. Though on this day it is newly summer;
I stop to collect several recently dead
butterflies of the dozens that fill the air
like tickertape. The wings of the living opening
and collapsing like tiny breaths. And who can’t breathe
in all this green? I take the dead home,
position them in a natural way, then pin their bodies
in a shadowbox, admire them even more if missing
a hind wing, a tattered or chipped forewing, some suffering
before the inevitable. I only collect those already dead
which means those that are imperfect. Each evening concludes
with the stained-glass sky. Maybe this place is church,
the forgiveness of sins, crucified relics of beauty,
a path that leads past and then toward the dead.
Copyright ©2024 by Didi Jackson. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, The New Yorker, and Oxford American among other journals and magazines. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She lives in Nashville and teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University.
Tagged: 2024 Southern Festival of Books, Book Excerpt, Poetry
