Three old men sit in folding chairs

under a yellow flaming cottonwood

at someone’s grave. They have

an accordion, a fiddle and a song,

food spread out on a striped blanket

and four glasses filled

with amber beer.

 

Look around and see from where

I came. How can I find

the bones of my ancestral skeleton flung

here and there?

 

Grandmother’s grave in Clarion Iowa lost

in a maze of cornfields

mother and sister under an oak tree

on the banks of the Mississippi
father under just one of millions

of identical white stones covering miles.
Great grandparents in Norway

Ireland Germany England.

Cherished teacher whose ashes we scattered
in the Little Tesuque River

up in the Sangre de Cristos

now his tiny white and blue and green

bone fragments not consumed by fire

rest at the muddy bottom
of the Gulf of Mexico

Even the dead migrate.

 

My feet flesh and bone planted
for twenty years in Santa Fe

but not deeply rooted as these three men

playing music under the cottonwood.

 

Where will this heart be buried

or where will these someday ashes

be scattered and on what winds?

How can I dance on the faraway

graves of my dead, play music

offer sugar skeletons

favorite food and drink?

 

Grandma, I would make you sweet lefse

if I knew how

and if I could get to Iowa

before dusk.

previously published in Manzanita Quarterly, Fall 2003