My mind keeps doubling back

to that snug back-lane necropolis,

with its firefly night-lights

quivering on marble tombs

set out like tables at a wedding,

whose last guests left an hour ago.

The Greeks don't see their dead

as really dead. And who can blame them?

forfeiting all that passionate light,

purples, cobalts, sapphire skies,

jasper, turquoise seas. So how

could they ever be happy in

a nothing-doing blind eternity?

Persephone and Dis go hotly at it

down below and doesn't she

come flouncing back for half the year?

Bones are buried treasure. They defy

something that always wants to be denied.

And there's always the moon

to put an unresenting face on things.

I keep homing in on that cemetery

as a place not to be afraid in, a place

of love still, asking you to imagine

that death is not an end but a continuing,

not just of atoms that disperse

and randomly regroup, but of obstinate

redounding memory

perhaps of strolling back, tipsy with talk

from a lingered-in taverna, and walking

among these graves with the sea –

thalassa! thalassa! – two hundred yards away down a wine-dark jasmine-scented lane.