Advance Directive

by Richard Taylor

Where beneath the quilted turf will I lie down,
snug in the covers of sweet-scented earth, the cuddle
of a cordial worm?

I ask the gentle air but do not find the place
I set four granite corners years ago
where I’ll go forth for good.

Somewhere here they wait beneath a blow-down pine
or the sprays of tiny wild pink flowers shivering
in the wind from Grafton Notch.

I tap across the cemetery grass like a knuckle
at a secret door, conjuring my plot loose
from memory and sod,

go sounding by the inch with a garden fork,
paying yard work down on a friable home,
stones that call time’s end.

But the ancient sexton with his rod upon the hill
and its redempted residents, declares my stones
are east by two feet and south by one,

and thus adrift, I am not welcome to die just yet,
for he it is who sets the etiquette of lingering here
and the company I’ll keep

from a measured bedstead set to proper north
and squared west, lest waking in a dream
I stumble in the dark.