EMILY OF AMHERST

What nursed you
was not immortality
though your aching life
cursed its own morality
and became opaque
here at your lonely grave
in Amherst
a few friends at visiting hours
come by to bring tulip flowers
and to share in your irony
when Satan bound
the Puritan children
in a false desire to care,
you make your argument
as a critic writing letters
in your soul's conversation
acting as an agnostic
to your betters
composing interrogations
in your pose
of self inquisitions
wholly imposing yourself
on others you cannot save
in the true atheistic position
from your aesthetic reality,
nor do you expect
the wealth of eternity
to respect your own modernity
here at the grave site
I long for a maternity
at first light's flame
asking sister Emily
to remove any masks
since you are
now part of our family,
a kin does not expect you
to know our behavior
from any blasphemy
at encounters
in our confessional verse,
all we professionally ask
is poetic mortality
which cannot be our savior
without any didactic
savoir faire or sin
life appears solely academic
here at your cemetery
among the sting from bees
in a universe we share in.