If I can’t be buried
in one of these passage graves,
nameless, without epitaph,
a stone bowl for these bones
instead of some municipal
rectangle, at least let me return
as the raven who watches over
these hills.
Then I could fly
cronking around like God’s
only machinery, and roll up
and peel off down Sligo
over green ringforts
untouchable to the men
who plow around them.
These cairns look like
the rubble of roadwork schemes
infinitely postponed. We crawl
under an east-facing lintel
into the earth, and rise in church-cool,
stone-dusted air to admire
in flashlight the corbeled ceiling,
the capstone worked uphill with others
from miles below the mountain.
It would make death
worthwhile if I could hire
the secrets of four old men red-faced
as the sun, their suits worn
from fieldwork, mannerly talkers
who weigh the arts of levering
stones with fire-cured poles.
To have an east-facing door
someone from the future
might crawl into, some winter solstice
in four or five millennia, to wait
long enough for sunrise to strike through.
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