THE ACHE OF RETRIEVAL
How it comes and how it has passed :
all that lethargy must know something.
Yet here, where the cemetery bends to
the river below, all things are lost and
forgotten. The highway past Newark
rounds its bend, a crumpet old Rt. 21,
and all these old graves stay asleep. They
crumble - these ancient mausoleums -
by our standards anyway, and amaze yet
the eye as they sink and tumble, haggard
and lost, with old those old family names
etched upon them. The very ground here
is parched where once it was rich with
water and a lately-arriving immigrant blood.
Small animals scurry while not much else
at all occurs. And - in fact - we've
been
told it's a dangerous place; been told to
not go there untended, or not to descend
to these lower sections (where it is we are
now) for fear of crime, or someone with a
knife intent on taking us down; for here it is
where the oldest dead dwell. Where many of
the names I see are recognized simply by the
fact that the old city above has streets named the
same. These are founders. These are the ones.
And, then, if I were to die here, by a deathly
mugging in an old and forgotten Newark
cemetery - Yes! Yes! How apt would that
really be. I would sleep the slumber of
ages, perhaps right there where I fell, where
my last earthly breath would come to be.
I would be saved; I am salvaged, I am free.
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