In The Suburbs

Walking by a pond,
I shiver briefly
near a mound of rocks
and rusted cans.

Because I prefer the visible world,
the blare of neon and loud comfort,
I ignore the possibility
that has just occurred to me,
that the mound covers
a maiden’s grave
and that she is calling to me
to open the pile and see her face,
open to the world, her jaw gaping,
teeth gray with soil, her hands gloved
in the rot of years —

how many years
has she lain here?  No telling, because
I will not stop to discover
if any of what I’m thinking
is true, and not a fantasy born
of my unfamiliarity
with the unseen.

I do not want to know if she’s in there,
or if the ground I cover
on my hurried way home
contains more like her — Nipmuc graves,
broken colonial skulls, the wrecks
of more recent people who remain nameless
though they shake me
as I pass. 
Every pond may be a grave site,
every heap of stones
a home for a plane
I will not acknowledge.
I do not want to know
where women
who never got a chance
to speak of rape
were raped.  I do not know
where children were killed. 
I do not know
how the poor suffered
on these same streets
back before affluence
covered their poverty.

In the suburbs, I never have to think
about why, in the middle of all this
light and sound, I sometimes shiver
as if the light
was full of ghosts.