Cemetery Summer

I spin idly two wheeling through the cemetary

trying to get my mind off you

getting off on poetry

as we do

ghost you, ghost me, spinning

The midafternoon sun warms my shoulders

Here are ghosts of men and women

Who lived sleepwalking lives

only a name and a year to hold them to earth

The sun warms their gravestones

Here beneath the cooling trees there is a gravestone that shares your name

some ancestor who lived, loved, died

but you are shockingly alive yet as distant as the dead

And vespers kiss the back of my neck with your breath

you are everywhere to me

the love I seek out of reach

my true friend

the one I have been waiting for

all these lines

all this time

But what you are to me you will not let me be to you

the ways you inspire me and use me

don't let me lose me

for I am lost in you

a ghost lifted from the body I once walked in

shifted by love and desire into new uncertainty

spinning through a cemetary

Will you speak my name? And use it to call down my soul?  My gravestone, a pebble in your palm

My life,  yours to possess

to claim or forget,  and disappear on the wind

three syllables uttered by your lips,  will bring me to life

home to body and soul

Or am I just a plaything, a temporary toy?