Remembrance

I went to the cemetery on Church Street today.
I visited our grave.
A stranger lays beneath the dirt,
but both of us lay on top of it once,
in the frosted dark, as Christmas
melted into Boxing Day,
with the smell of pine needles and frozen earth,
as our breath made wreaths in cold air
that prickled sharp and crisp as holly leaves.
The stars looked strewn across the sky
-- the bright, hard glitter
of shards of broken Christmas tree baubles --
and, when you moved in me,
pinning me to icy turf,
they flared and flickered
like fairy lights.
And all around us,
below us,
the chill of winter and death,
of the long night, crowding around
the brilliant, pulsing circle we’d made
of light and heat and being alive.

It seemed so unbreakable back then,
that circle of ours,
in the frosted dark of that empty, brittle churchyard.

I went to the cemetery on Church Street today.
You might call it mourning, perhaps.
Or maybe just remembrance.