First Cemetery of Athens

The day I went to the First Cemetery
Looking for famous graves, the sky was blue
As wild irises in February
And there were mourners walking two by two
And gravediggers who had folk to bury
Along the cypress-vaulted avenue:
Priests and florists, all that’s understood 
In the solemn bustle of death’s livelihood.

I came there seeking the adventurer,
The poet, the novelist, composer of song,
And though I had no map, yet I was sure
I’d come upon them if I wandered long
Among the plaques and formal portraiture,
The rows of marble headstones hundreds strong,
Eponymous mausoleums with their claim
To immortality, at least in name.

Then in the lesser alleys of the dead
Among the graven years mumbled with moss,
I felt somebody watching and turned my head,
And there a small girl stood, as at a loss,
And looked at me, as if something I’d read
Aloud was too loud, as if she might toss
Her curls and put her hands upon her hips,
But pressed instead a finger to her lips

To say, “Don’t wake them,” and she seemed to smile
To find herself and someone else alone
Sharing a secret for a little while,
Though I could walk away and she was stone.
I could not find among the rank and file
Among the rude democracy of bone
Any of the famous men I sought
Although I scanned the legends plot by plot.

But I found widows bent over the task
Of tending shrines, and women washing the grime
Patiently from angels who wore a mask
Where acid rain turned marble into lime.
A woman stopped me on the path to ask—
As someone asks a stranger for the time—
Where she could find the Sleeper, to lay a rose
Upon that breathless beauty’s long repose.

But roaming lost amidst death’s anterooms,
I did not find the exile or his bust,
Nor the swashbuckling ransacker of tombs
Who sifted stories for the golden dust
Of kings and queenly ladies at their looms,
All that was not devoured by moth or rust;
Nor the composer, nor the novelist.
The more I looked for them, the more I missed—

It was the grave of nobody I sought—
It was the purling of the ash-gray dove
In cypress boughs, and plastic flowers bought
To be the token of undying love
Some twenty years ago—they could not rot
But faded to a kind of garish mauve
Just like the fading afternoon—while I
Wandered between two dates, and earth and sky.