Mark DeFoe


AT A UKRAINIAN CEMETERY IN NEW JERSEY

I

Soft November afternoon. I scuff down
a path through the browning grass toward willows
and a bridge. The ubiquitous geese are here,
honking foulers of every manmade stream
in Jersey. Here they are placid, gliding
the brown waters of this tidal creek.

I cross and wander among the graves of strangers
who came to ground here, liming this earth
with their old world sorrows, these Slavs
moldering with the shards of Powhatans
and Lenni Lenape, bittersweet mix,
bones of the dispossessed and the displaced.


II

Boxed by traffic, this wedge of peace is studded
with massive brown and gray headstones: on the
sunrise side, sentiments in plain English.
On the west, the family name in Cyrillic.

Eastward is Manhattan and Ground Zero.
But these sleepers have their own horrors to mull,
these sons and daughters of murdered Kulaks,
survivors from boxcars of death, German
and Hungarian peasants with Russian names,
semi-assimilated and cursed.

Their children's children have wrung success
from freedom. High in the towers that fine
September day, inferno at their office door,
some may have linked hands, stepped from
a window, still striven to soar. But here
there is no memory of lost Kiev,
nor of jumpers, that wakes these sleepers now.


III

This home of the immigrant dead abuts
a suburb. Huge oaks divide backyard from graveyard.
I walk the fence line, peering at fading paint,
shabby gardens and pools with broken tile.
Some Jones can't quite make it to Jonesville

Fat squirrels frolic over graves. Ben Franklin
would have loved it here, for aphorisms
seem to shimmer golden in the quiet air.


IV

Back at my motel, leaves have blown in,
scattered the oak leaf motif of the carpet.
Deceived, I bend to touch them, to learn which
is art and which informs me that summer
is truly lost. On the plane home I take out
three acorns—polished brown, they glow in my palm.

I'm a good Puritan. These seeds should be a sign
that flaming towers and Slavic graves can be
transformed, even blessed, by soft autumn afternoons.
I long to hear these acorns whisper,
sweet holy peace will yet return. Such a
myth is hard to come by, dearly bought.
It will not happen soon

(from the chapbook The Green Chair, 2003)

Mark DeFoe is a professor of English at West Va. Wesleyan College. His fifth collection of poetry is The Green Chair (Pringle Tree Press).

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