Gravestones: A Series of Prose Poems
The Burrow
By Megan Baxter


What navigates between the emptiness of bone and bone? What calls the chest cavity, the hollow skull home? It is, in a sense, a second life, born again from this still grave. The world in all its seasons crawls into you again. Smaller though, shorter lived. Flat against the tombstone, generations travel down the familiar passage, through topsoil, sand, by the strong beam of femur and arm bone, the empty eyes of old hips. Would you call them your children? Would you call this desecration? Or is this what you wished for, to be made again of what you are made of, to be useful to the coming futures, to be, in this last act, helpful? How many lives have been born into your body, the small, countless deliveries, the swarm rising, running loose in the graveyard, forced to find a more imperfect home. To be home is to be like love, a return when, taking off the coat against the wind, loosening the hair, warming the hands near the woodstove, you feel, wholly alive again, entirely human and by that order, animal. The long afternoon shadows cast deep black the entrance of their burrow.