MEMORIAL DAY
It is easily forgotten, year to year, exactly where the plot is, though the place is entirely familiar— a willow tree by a curving roadway sweeping black asphalt with tender leaves;
damp grass strewn with flower boxes, canvas chairs, darkskinned old ladies circling in draped black crepe family stones, fingers cramped red at the knuckles, discolored nails, fresh soil for new plants, old rosaries;
such fingers kneading the damp earth gently down on new roots, black humus caught in grey hair brushed back, and the single waterfaucet, birdlike upon its grey pipe stem, a stream opening at its foot.
We know the stories that are told, by starts and stops, by bent men at strange joy regarding the precise enactments of their own gesturing. And among the women there will be a naming of families, a counting off, an ordering.
The morning may be brilliant; the season is one of brilliances—sunlight through the fountained willow behind us, its splayed shadow spreading westward, our shadows westward, irregular across damp grass, the close-set stones.
It may be that since our walk there is faltering, moving in careful steps around snow-on-the-mountain, bluebells and zebragrass toward that place between the willow and the waterfaucet, the way is lost, that we have no practiced step there, and walking, our own sway and balance, fails us. —Michael Anania
