Grapevine Graveyard

We haven’t it.  It.  It’s a sad thing to accept.  Difficult, too, near-on impossible.  I placed the emptied bottle of pinot noir at the foot of the willow tree, and I covered it in a tattered shroud of wintered leaves.  The heavy sense of a field of stony mortality spread out from its lonely roots like the hem of a nightgown.  A jumper dress for the dead, I thought, as I surveyed the graveyard scene; pillared mausoleums, statues of sword-wielding angels, tiny American flags hanging limply from ten inches of plastic pole.  Flowers, wan and yellow, throwing petals across plots like rice before the wed.  Dates erased by wind and rain remembered only by the person beneath.  I am too preoccupied with death, I knew, to consider myself one of the living.

I took the keys from my pocket, and unfolded the pocketknife.  My grandfather always had a pocketknife on him, and I think he relished opportunities to brandish it.  I was always genially bemused as he carefully sliced the tape that held the wrapping paper fast against his Christmas presents.  With my high brow furrowed and my tongue absently clove close to the roof of my mouth, I slowly carved a message into the willow’s brittle bark.  He would have been aghast to see me so casually and pointlessly dull and crook the blade.  This city is too old, I thought, to keep burying its dead.  There should be a taxidermist on every corner, stuffing the dead with conscientious care and not undue sympathy.  Then we can arrange them in situations they would find familiar, whether from habit, fear, or both.  Fear is, you know, the most common habit of all.  Grandma could sit in her rocking chair, spindles worn, although I don’t ever think she really found it all that comfortable.  Something about being a farmer’s wife in a rocking chair, knitting needles busy and mind free to bravely wander the silence, made her content, even despite an artist’s aversion to the hackneyed.  Or maybe because of it; an archetype can be a cozy place to make a home.  Individuality is scant solace or safeguard against loneliness.

In spring, after such a long, cold winter, sunlight tattoos everything it touches.  I considered getting a tattoo, once; the constellation Pegasus on my right shoulder, maybe, or the second law of thermodynamics on my chest.  A gadfly for Bellerophon, or a body decaying in search of equilibrium.  I decided against it.  My tastes change, just as the rest of me; I am an inexact cloud, nothing specific.  My hair is thinning, its front lines beating a hesitant retreat up my large head.  The bags that brim with my eyes are purpling with the bruises of years spent helplessly awake or in a shallow sleep.  In just a short while, I will look like FDR lost his wheelchair.  A car drove by, an elderly man scowling in the driver seat.  He probably thought me a creature of the counterculture; a goth kid, an indie kid, an emo kid, a punk kid, and all kids.  Graveyards are quiet and picturesque, and conducive to introspection.  I nodded to him, lukewarm cordiality, receiving no such genuflection in return.

There’s a familiar feeling rolling in at the forefront of May.  A volcano erupting noiselessly, spewing no ash or lava, killing none, sparing all.  A disaster with no repercussions, and no causality; a disaster for disaster’s sake.  I retrieved a receipt from the grocery store from my pocket, and I scribbled the date on its yellow back.  April 25th, 2010.  On April 25th, 1859, engineers from France and England broke ground on the Suez Canal; although I doubt they lost much sleep to it, I might worry at the import of transforming a continent into an island.  A little neuroticism to gnaw at, and be gnashed by in return.  I fashioned a rudimentary nail from the splinter of a dead branch, and I impaled the receipt, a crude headstone, over the message I’d etched with the pocketknife, and all of it six feet, two inches above the buried wine bottle.  The day was nearly dead, and always in celebration.  The mallards regarded me as they waddled by, the chill April lake beckoning; I smiled.  I am too alive, I knew, to ever envy the dead.  As I left, the stiff spring breeze tore the receipt from the tree, revealing the message beneath.  Soon.  With love.