At St. Canises Cathedral, Kilkenny Poem by Susan Gardner

On the funerary cover, drapery
shining black and beautiful,
centuries of parishioners have yielded to its tactile seduction
and left a polished ghost of their passing caresses.

Flesh and bones consumed by decades ticking on,
century yielding to millennia,
and none of these lords and their few ladies
noticing at all.

My hand trails the looping folds of medieval Irish limestone,
polished deep perfect black,
a shade thinner, more black now than before I came.

And I, too, am a shade thinner,
a microscopic layer of fingertips left on this lady's robe
clothing her eternity,
not mine yet.