Gravestones: A Series of Prose Poems
The New Stones
By Megan Baxter

The boys look over a piece of equipment- a potato digger; horse drawn, rusted, crumbling under the maple. Totally useless. Are lives like that, or memories, crumbling, born by beasts of the past into a nowhere, drawing up the heavy roots of the earth, turning them in dark bellies, hungry for production, for the meager substance of soil and water and light, clattering, rolling, abandoned. In this graveyard, new stones replace the old, they crumble behind their new counterparts, so clean, a new death so to speak, they stand behind like a shadow, like a haunting, like a terrible doppelganger of all- the corpse, the beauty of bone, the geometry of muscle reduced to ______and it crumbles inward and outward into the still soil, over the grass like reflected light, or, maybe, like blood. In this graveyard the old beats out the new, daily, the dark old stones sing the truth. All that was, is not now. Nothing can fix that; there is no use in trying. They are becoming dirt, lichen, sand dust. Rot, rust, rot heart, crumble bone.