Epitaphs

I can hear the leaves crunch neatly under my feet

The air is sharp and inhales

On my eyeballs and cheeks and the tops of my hands

At 4 P.M. I walk. Looking

at the mounds who

Were people in another October.

Families together in plots

My eyes search for quotes

That are pretty words.

I feel the heaviness of dead.

We are looking for meaning.

She is hard to live without,

Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done

Reads one.

Not yet thirty, mother of three.

He had a good run,

Reads this one. I smile,

It is nice because he was ninety.

The rest are surprising

They only have names.

They are Wife of,

Husband of

No graceful list of accomplishments

Majestic verbiage,

Worldly meanings,

Just two names.

They were defined by the people they chose to love.

They were the wife of, husband of, somebody

When we are so dead

For so long, that nobody knows

That is how they will know who we were.

I like that.

Remembered in the context forever

Of the people we chose and choose.

I was so worried about a good enough quote

But “quote,” means it belongs to someone else.

My own words are not even mine.

(This is all plagiarized anyway)

but not a name.

That, that can be totally and completely mine

A person and I belong to them.

In a hundred years

When some girl in a college class goes to my cemetery

I want her to know that I chose, and somebody in my life was

worthy of sharing my headstone.

That a person, all mine, was my epitaph.