I found this dry cemetery very moving when my brother, David, took me there after our Southern Utah family reunion. Below these mighty rocks lie the careful interments of Mormon pioneers. The wind seems to be taking away the earth around the gravemounds.
Slowly, slowly.
In that brief immersion in family history I noticed how small their remaining houses were, and how limited the things anyone could see, do, possess were.
Below is the first half of Transtromer's Eight Haiku;
to accompany this bleak desert graveyard.
Tomas Transtromer, The Living and the Dead,
Harper Collins, 1995, p. 62
Power lines
taut in the kingdom of cold
north of all music.
The white sun
practices long distance running
against death's blue mountain
We must live
with the small print of the grass
and the cellar laughter.
The sun is low now.
The shadows are giants.
Soon all will be shadow.
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