The Poem I Whisper at the Grave
Same eight lines every visit; the marble knows them by now.
The cemetery gate squeaks in E flat, and I would know, because I have opened it one hundred and fifty-six times. Every second Sunday for six years, rain permitting and usually not caring whether it permits, I walk the gravel loop past the maple that goes traitor-red in October, sit for exactly one coffee on the green bench that faces nothing in particular, and then I go and whisper eight lines of poetry to a slab of marble with my wife's name on it.
Ana would find the whole production hilarious. She used to say I had the spiritual instincts of a filing cabinet.
The eight lines are hers.
She wrote them in our first year of marriage, in pencil, on the back of an electricity bill, and folded them into my lunch bag between a cheese sandwich and an apology, because we had fought the night before about money, which is to say about fear. I read them standing up in the loading dock at work, twenty-six years old, sawdust in my collar, and I remember thinking with absolute certainty: I am going to be reading this for the rest of my life. I was right in a way I would not wish on anyone.
I never memorized the poem on purpose. It memorized itself, the way the code to your first apartment does. And when she died, six years ago this November, out of nowhere... an artery and forty minutes and a doctor with kind, useless hands, I stood at the grave after everyone left and could not think of a single thing to say to her. Thirty-four years of never running out of conversation, and I stood there mute in my funeral shoes.
So I said her own lines back to her.
Quietly, so the groundskeeper would not hear. All eight.
And then I did it again two Sundays later, because the first time had felt less like talking to a stone and more like handing her something she had left on the counter.
People are strange about grave visit rituals. Say the word ritual and they picture candles and robes, or they picture something clinical their therapist assigned. Mine is smaller than either. Gate, gravel, maple, bench, coffee, eight lines. I do not bring flowers, because Ana thought cut flowers were morbid: "You bring me something dying to prove you love me?" I bring the poem. It is the only thing I own that was never dying.
A ritual is just a promise you keep small enough that you can keep it forever.
For six years the system worked.
Then, one hundred and forty-some visits in, on an ordinary gray Sunday last spring, I got four lines deep and line five was not there.
Not misplaced. Gone.
A smooth blank wall where thirty years of a sentence used to be. I stood at the grave opening and closing my mouth like a man trying to restart himself, and the panic that came up was all out of proportion, and also exactly in proportion, because here is the thing I had never once admitted: I had no copy. The electricity bill went missing in the 2003 move. Ana never wrote the poem anywhere else; she was not sentimental about her own words, only mine. For six years the entire poem had existed in exactly one place, which was me, and I am seventy-one, and my own father spent his last two years losing nouns like pocket change.
I got line five back that day... eventually. It surfaced on the walk home, right at the corner where the bakery vents its warm bread smell onto the street, and I stood there and said it out loud to no one, and a woman with a stroller crossed to the other sidewalk, and I did not blame her.
But the fright would not leave. The whole way home it kept presenting me with the same arithmetic: the poem had survived Ana by six years... and it would survive me by zero.
I want to be honest about how much I did not want to write it down. Writing it down felt like a betrayal of the arrangement. The whisper was ours. The unrecorded, uncopied, unperformed privacy of it was the entire point, one thing in this world that had never been shared, forwarded, or explained. My daughter does not know the poem exists. My granddaughter thinks Grandpa goes to the cemetery to "do his talking." Close enough.
It took me a month, and a lot of reading in places where other widowed people write about grief without flinching, to understand what I was actually protecting. Not the poem... The exclusivity. And exclusivity is a strange god to serve at seventy-one, when the alternative is that eight lines by Ana Ferreira, the best unread poet of her generation, population of readers: one, simply blink out with my pulse. I found a page once collecting writers nobody had heard yet, and it sat wrong with me for days, because Ana was one of them and I was the reason.
I was not her keeper. I was her bottleneck.
So here is what I did, and I did it in this order, because order matters in a ritual.
First, I wrote the poem down, longhand, on the back of our current electricity bill. Symmetry is cheap, but it is not nothing. Second, I taught it to my granddaughter, Lucia, age nine, on the green bench, over hot chocolate, on the condition that it is bench-and-grave material only, a rule she takes more seriously than any adult would. She learned all eight lines in twenty minutes because her memory is a young dog and mine is an old one. Fourth Sunday of every month, she comes with me now. She does the whispering when the weather is mean, because, she says, my whisper in the wind is "basically shouting."
And third, this past March, with my daughter's blessing and my heart going like the gate hinge, I typed Ana's eight lines and entered them into a monthly poetry contest, author line reading Ana Ferreira, 1954 to 2020. Submitted posthumously by her husband, who held onto them too long. They did not win. I sat with the results email for a while... and then laughed, because Ana would have gone up one side of the judges and down the other, and also because winning was never the errand. Somewhere, a stranger on a screening panel read her lines. Population of readers: no longer one. The bottleneck is open.
The ritual has not changed, in case you are wondering. Gate, gravel, maple, bench, coffee, eight lines, one hundred and fifty-six visits and counting. The marble knows them by now, I truly believe that, the way a step knows a foot.
But last month, at the grave, Lucia got to line five and stopped, and my chest seized, and she turned around with a grin she absolutely inherited from her grandmother.
"Just checking you still have it," she said.
I have it. And now, so does she. That is the whole trick, I think. That is the only one I know.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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