meditation on the awareness of death

TO HIM who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language   -William Cullen Bryant

in between
bouts of pillow pair of windows 
burgundy drapes bludgeon the sooty light staggers in through 
lids of lids you arise and descend slender lime wedge stairs 
exhaled from brick into monday evening's quelled 
street still feels like late afternoon playing games with time 
again your clock double-crossed as your always black 
clad neighbor quite nice in spite of the attire sits on some 
steps nearby talking on his cellphone while he takes his smoking 
outside the coroner sky has pulled the sheet over us today not 
cold nor cool but not quite warm either you wear a burgundy 
sweater beneath your black rain jacket the numbers ascending 
as you begin you begin 
to notice fresh stumps where all the tree limbs were 
amputated away from our wires and now you recall 
waking up to that saw as you wonder if trees scream 
and every amputated limb is an amber moon that makes you 
wince beneath the clouds strangled in the sky 
as you walk beneath them 
and then you come to the cemetery you did not come to 
visit any buried bodies or repair a grave with flowers  
you are only here to exploit its calm 
quiet the graveyard get away that blanket does not 
warm but quell and you 
do not inspect the grave markers nor read the tombstones 
though you long to peer inside that tiny old church 
grieving in the cemetery's middle as you gaze up 
sucked into the hush of elderly trees like grandparents 
who do not speak much but whose presence slows you 
down teaches you another speed  
odd this burying of bodies when they are deceased 
but you have never stayed in one place long enough to belong 
so how could you know what it's like to 
die in the place you belonged to and so you walk among them 
breathing deeper as if the air were blessed 
water waiting for your lungs to accept the sign 
and then just before you have completed 
tracing the contours of the cemetery's square 
you notice a bird perched high in one of the old trees 
you do not see very well but somehow you always notice 
the birds as if attuned to their presence even though 
this one has not called or sung 
it watches as you approach peering through the web of still 
skeletal branches as if you could identify but 
you can tell that the feathers of its head are lighter 
as if the bird were wearing a pale hood over 
the rest of its darker body as it flutters to 
a different branch and you continue to circle the tree 
you find a dead squirrel lying on the ground near a grave 
as another scrambles up the bark and you look up 
at the bird still watching and decide to leave not wanting 
to interrupt anymore than you have wondering if 
anyone has ever died while visiting a cemetery 
as you walk back home to sit on your pillow again.