Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a founder
of the first American school for
the deaf, Wallace Stevens, and Samuel
Colt—three buried in Cedar Hill
Cemetery, Hartford, Connecticut.

Everything is necessary, nothing
is sufficient. Speak to see
who listens.

A manner of speaking as necessary attribute,
ubiquitous, annunciatory as bells, a rollicking
of winter air. Who speaks
still dies, eventually, if recent

events are any guide. I am silent, standing
hat in hand and watching the spadefuls flung
onto caskets, a tear here and there a hand wrung

while graying clouds dissipate, dilapidate and
dutiful humans homeward heading. We borrowed
the word from the Norse, die, but everyone always
had such a word, surely. If words were sure.

Here's a threat of snow and eventually fallen
it will cover and convert the landscape; the littering
beneath the landscape the litter of us recent

dead decaying fallen as is our state—late
lamented living lying there a layer ghostly beneath
the blooming sod. Sad or funny? Funny. Funereal.
They dissipate, hissing; hear the sun strike each flake.