Fallmates

 
Modest in kind, headstones
remainders of two women.
 
            Attila Cox.
                    Bonnie Bristow.
Quiet and unsparing
in their loitering float
                                 through the years.
 
Graves here in Cave Hill
when I was born
      and unbeknownst
as I scattered from Limerick
     to Henderson, Cleveland
 
          to Cincinnati, Lexington,
              Charlottesville, Chicago…
Forty-seven when I find them,
 
They’ve aged not a whit.
 
Surely neither knew the other,
their plots a quarter mile apart
 
brought together by an afternoon walk.
I stop to jot them in a notebook,
    resurrectionless
          again as what
 
               parents and marriages
                     called them.
Attila Bristow. Bonnie Cox.
Names to mix and match.
In a story I’ll surely
 
   abandon in draftage,
they’ll be characters, main
   or minor, doesn’t matter.
Combinations of two lifespans
 
extending beyond their mortal reach
tapping my shoulder
 
for the turn and the look, not to thank me.