Liber Plutonis - Chapter 60

Verses

I tend the cemetery because the dead are excellent neighbors and the soil is scandalously fertile.

Every grave is planted first with a name.

Rain erases the sharpness of letters before it erases affection.

I sow crocus between two brothers who refused to speak for twenty years. Underground they have become less territorial.

The pomegranate tree feeds on what mourners prefer not to imagine.

Nothing here is clean, which is why everything grows.

Children ask whether flowers eat the dead. I tell them flowers eat sunlight, water, minerals, and whatever stories adults cannot digest.

The old widow leaves milk for a cat beside her husband's stone.

The cat drinks to the exact depth of its theology.

In winter the cemetery looks defeated.

Under frost, bulbs are conducting private negotiations.

Spring does not conquer death. It borrows from the same soil.

Plouton is Rich because the ground keeps every deposit and pays interest in strange currencies.

Bone becomes mineral, grief becomes habit, habit becomes tenderness if weather permits.

At dusk I lock the gate for the living.

The dead have never asked for a key.