Patrick Carr

The mortician stuffs his mouth

with steak and eggs

and the coffin maker pens another

ten-page love letter

and the grave digger tunes an old guitar

and the hearse driver splashes

rum into his coffee

and the florist

guillotines a fat cigar and

five tombstones idle

outside the island monument shop

in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Tombstones for Sale,”

watercolor with gouache and ink, six inches by nine,

never sold, never for sale, and emphatically

“NOT Art—NOT AT ALL.”

Business can wait.

The tropical morning—in the painting,

the tropical morning—

snoozes through the dawn.

The cemetery fence yawns

and waves away a wild chicken.

The monument shop,

a cottage really, is shuttered,

and dreams of undiscovered rooms.

It would tremble in a wind gust.

Tombstones plod through here

like dirges wafting

from a penny whistle.

The sun is low enough there is no sun.

A poinciana tree rises over the scene

past the unmarked outlined stones,

potted plants,

and bursts into a canopy

of red and green flowers and leaves,

a shade tree that is up too early.

Foliage fills in against the shop roof

and balances down the branches

from the pale sky to the facade.

It blots the shop

and the shop’s neighbor in the back,

a ghostly double. 

The shop’s two lined-in windows are shut.

The lined-in double doors are shut

and have no knob.

The dead are nowhere to be found.

Rising again notice

the poinciana—bent, bowing,

flush with bright red flowers,

reminding you that in its depths

the earth is liquid,

that every tombstone

stands beside the universe.

It is sorry for blooming

in your view and hopes

you are not troubled

by any greater inconvenience.

Look. It is one of us.

Its red and green hang

one against the other,

alternating passion and ease,

agony and relief.

Lifetimes jitter off the branches.

It looks like a tree you’ve been looking at

too long, like you would see it

with your eyes shut,

if only for a few seconds. Even now it’s fading.

The tombstones abide, still blank slates.

If you took a rubbing, you would see

a perfect picture of the void, but

the stones stand in the same order

—tallest in the middle, two on either side—

the same order precisely

as the petals of a poinciana flower.

Look as long as you want.

The tombstones are not for you.

They are a flower, which is.