Maine Burial Plot

by Thomas R. Moore

Granite posts square a God’s acre, a tiny
plot of blueberries and asters beside a crushed–
stone drive to three new houses on the shore.

The black slate headstones vanished a few years
back, pretty pieces for a garden in New York
or maybe it was kids one night in a pick–up

drinking Bud Lite who tipped them out, then
regretted what they’d done and dropped the stones
into a gully.  Somebody knows.  The names

are erased except on a tax roll or a family tree —
hardscrabble farmers working thin soil over
ledge, the husband cutting shingles at a mill

or wrestling granite or shaping white oak
futtocks for a schooner in Castine.  The new
driveway skirts a rough–cut granite cellar

hole grown up in popple, the apple trees gone
wild, the only sounds a clunking hoe, the gulls,
the wind, a washboard’s splash and thrum.