Old Cambridge Cemetery
by Stephen Haven
Wind-softened in bas relief, the slate bone markers
Were skeletons we traced with calloused fingers,
One of us a violinist, one played guitar, one touched
That broken braille with the hands of a choir boy
Aching in the body of a man. The anagrams
Of those half missing names: Scanning them
As if they too once brushed flesh and bone,
The stone cut by a journeyman, maybe
A good friend, water whisks in the drain
Of each of them, a ditch on either side
Of the groundskeeper’s groomed path
Where they may never hope to find
The semblance of another sky, scout, pioneer,
Rover treading Mars, sampling the soil
As if there were a sphere greater than these holes
In the air, this vanishing that draws us to call the dirt
Our own Earth, the music in our fingertips
Assigning letters to the missing engravings,
As if our touch might less fully blur
These parentheses, centuries of numerals waking
Finally to a granular measure that leaves us
In our last hour, when only our children
Will gaze back at our digital towers,
The atavistic software of our reign, where we
Are buried in some new way, screenless in
The glassless glass, where still we key our names.
Stephen Haven's fourth collection of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was published by Slant Books in 2025. His most recent earlier collection, The Last Sacred Place in North America, was selected by T.R. Hummer for the New American Prize in 2012. His poems have appeared recently in Blackbird, The Common, Vox Populi, Verse Daily, The Montreal Review, Live Encounters, and elsewhere.
