The Stone Dog

It's the middle of November, now, and so I am still posting poems about death and remembering the dead:

This one appeared in my book  Vexed Questions:

 

 

The Stone Dog

 

My father and I
wander the Protestant cemetery
Oaklands
examining tombstones. Gravitating toward
a door sized flat stone
with a life sized Labrador
keeping watch
over the bones of his owner.
I’m small enough to ride him,
and I do, while the brown leaves flag me,
while my father smokes and waits.

Even in his absence
I have roamed cemeteries:
Emmitsburg Blandford Kinzers
Mount Saint Mary’s
Oaklands again, Saint Agnes,
West Chester Friends ,
The cemetery of forgotten birthdays
The cemetery of rejected poems
The cemetery of bad choices


Now I stand before my parents’ grave
on a blue sky April day,
gusty winds cough
on the hill high bluff above
Route 100, where
cars fly by.
They're glad to lie there
by the road they rode so often,
the road to Exton
to Morstein
to Atglen
to Gap.
More at the glen, gaping
at a stone dog I searched for last week,
where someone had stolen him.