Memorial Day, Pilgrimage Poem by Diane Lee Moomey

Father and mother and me
drive to Dickinson, to Chazy
and Champlain, where our dead remain:
with potted mums we pay homage
on their granite doorsteps.

Drive past Holsteins and new corn,
where deep in Dutchman's pipe we find
his once-screened porch,
her summer kitchen, his head-high hedge
once clipped and mown — their former homes
now other-owned, or burnt,
or gone to dock and chicory.

We do not bury our houses when they die.

Don't look, she cries. He had hydrangeas
all along that fence. Don't look.

A fruit cellar. Was it hers?Just the cellar,
wild berries now twined around
their cousins in tumbled jam jars.

The graveyard visit was the easier.