I like visiting the cemetery. Green-Wood is the famous one in town. it is filled with grassy slopes, walking trails, fountains and ponds. Holy Cross is the one I go to most often.
most days, it’s difficult for me to consider my course through the world. but when I’m there, imagining people’s lives from the epitaphs left behind, it’s easier for me to think about the mystery of my own unfinished life.
sometimes I photograph the gravestones. sometimes I lie beside them and think about the person lying there beside me, their special loneliness now, or bring flowers.
it’s nice to visit where people are or you believe them to be. just because they have died, doesn’t bring the relationships the living have with them to an end. I’m happy to surround myself with their ghosts, asking this stranger for a little help with a line, discussing my new song with the one over there, taking a breezy hill walk with my dad. to love them is easy. they’re final, perfect.
I imagine them listening with eyes down and smiling sweetly, looking at me lovingly with their abstract sorrow, as if ready to speak kindly, though they never speak.
sometimes it’s a vague presence that moves up ghost-like from a well of silence and into my heart — reminding me there is another world, and it is in this one, one sustaining the other.
cookie nieves 
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