[Image: “Holt Cemetery,” by Kevin O’Mara. (Found it on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) Cemeteries in New Orleans, famously, feature (often elaborate) above-ground tombs. As the photographer says of Holt Cemetery, “the only in-ground cemetery in New Orleans. It serves as a good reminder of why we usually lay our dead to rest above ground.” He adds, “the maintenance of the individual graves is up to those who purchased the plots. Because of the water table situation here most graves aren’t even dug six feet deep, and families are permitted to re-use them a year and a day after the last interment.”]

From whiskey river:

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

(Edward Abbey [source])

…and:

Half Life

We walk through half our life
as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open
our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are
we watch the ghost of us drift
from room to room
through friends and lovers
never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean
or meaning half we say
we dream ourselves
from birth to birth
seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks
and the heart can not abide
a moment longer
as the rest of us awakens,
summoned from the dream,
not half caring for anything but love.

(Stephen Levine [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

I have flipped through books, reading hundreds of opening and closing lines, across ages, across cultures, across aesthetic schools, and I have discovered that first lines are remarkably similar, even repeated, and that last lines are remarkably similar, even repeated. Of course in all cases they remain remarkably distinct, because the words belong to completely different poems. And I began to realize, reading these first and last lines, that they are not only the first and last lines of the lifelong sentence we each speak but also the first and last lines of the long piece of language delivered to us by others, by those we listen to. And in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem I encountered words that mark the first something made out of language that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain:  I love you. I am here with you. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now. And I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth:  I love you. You are not alone. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now.

But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising. Among Emily Dickinson’s last words (in a letter). A woman whom everyone thought of as shut-in, homebound, cloistered, spoke as if she had been out, exploring the earth, her whole life, and it was finally time to go in. And it was.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

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