The Dead Walk
By Kathryn Lasseter
April 15, 2023
April 15, 2023
|
|
When I walk my dog in the
memorial park, I have no one to visit among the dead. I go for the beauty of the views and the peace of the hush. My dead are planted elsewhere, my parents in a hard clay country cemetery in southern Alabama, my husband scattered along the scruffy armpit of the Florida shore where we were married, all on the other side of the country. I never visit. Easter Sunday and flowers resurrect themselves despite frosty mornings. Long-lived camellias flush with coral blooms. A few mourners visit cold stones to offer flowers, to pray, to commune with cryogenic memories. A pink ceramic bunny guards a marker. After paying homage to the ground, Grievers might lift their eyes to distant mountains, silvered by melting snow, imbibe solace from rich scents seeping up from warming earth. I sometimes wish that in my final blindness, I, too, might sleep here or on another sloping grassy hill with a view of mountains and horizons. Where we languidly arise and walk by night, gliding transparently under the vaultless black sky. |
Kathryn Lasseter is a retired college professor, now living in Oregon. She has published on Jane Austen, Henry James, Gothic literature and film, and on the rise of sexualized images in popular culture. “The Dead Walk” is her first published poem.