By Nancy Eimers

You say you like the thought of graves being visited.
As the older sister I fear I won’t be available.

But I’d want to go on leave, take a trip back down or up
or away from the utterness of being gone

twice, in a way, since you will be gone too, we gone from each other,
I’d want my being gone to imagine you having company

and allow me to visit the little graveyard near where you lived,
though maybe I’d find myself standing there—hovering?—

in a sort of bewilderment: what was the reason, does grief
even remember me, remember having a body,

and did I want to make it my business to say something
to you—over you—(quietly

in case one of the nearby houses was listening)
or maybe sing some little song we knew, that the silliest part

in each of us might have been comforted, or confronted
by who knows how far apart we have traveled and when

or if we arrive (from ariver, “to come to land”).
But it touches me, even so, to think of you wanting

graves to be visited (though maybe not as strangers visit
Elmore Leonard, Dickens of Detroit, on Greenwood’s public tours)—

that sense of somewhere to go, small space marked on a map
of a park-like place with houses all around.

---

Nancy Eimers is the author of Human Figures (New Michigan Press, 2022), Oz (Carnegie Mellon, 2011), and three previous poetry collections. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and she has been the recipient of a Nation “Discovery” Award, a Whiting Writers Award, and two NEA Fellowships.