Suddenly It Was Me
A Taneytown graveyard I ventured to enter, its still, white headstones luring me in, offering me, like a stoic gray ghost, the first and last statistics of various lives now residing quietly beneath the winter earth. I passed each one of them looking at the etchings in the white marble, the birthdates and deathdates, some in this century, some not, an old resting place this was, moving me to visualize a funeral, dark clothed mourners standing in a 1924 pre-"Market Crash" sunshine, their black clothing stark in the sun's bright face. Then I passed a headstone with a familiar name, the name of Palmer. A chill hit me but originating from a warm gut, cooling the tiny organs in my body. The Palmer of the stone rang out like a bell only a dog could hear, leaping at me off the stone, cold letters of unearthly stillness, a dead cat suddenly infused with the lightening of life. I stopped and stared. It was no Palmer I knew, then it became a Palmer I knew, it became in the light of a setting sun what you would think it would only become in the thick black night, when entities become other entities. Suddenly it was me there, in the dark earth, my hands and eyes and body mere dust, with worms dining on my leftovers like restaurant critics. Suddenly I was the Palmer written indelibly into the marker, in the falling evening, in my car, warm living hands gripping the wheel, it was futile, for I saw my own body underneath, and the me in the car was no longer me but another person, identity unknown, slowly moving by, looking and reading my name. I was now alive and dead, warm and cold, stiff and moving, driving and lying stretched out, straight as the trunk of an oak, prone as Lazarus before the whispered calling. I felt everything, I felt it all, each world, the here and the hereafter, running through me, ambiguous rivers like blood, uncertain blood, blood not sure if it desires to be blood anymore. The marble knew my name, the marble had my name, and in some odd way, inexplicable as a single cell, the marble had me. © Lamont Palmer
