I walked to the closest cemetery yesterday right after I talked with Evelyn. Barely made it by closing time. Right by the intersection of Covert St, Joy Way and Central Avenue. (I don't need to make this stuff up!)
I thought it might be good to confront fear directly. Go to the charnal ground, so to speak. How do you step off a 100-foot pole?
There were the usual old tombs (the cemetery goes back to 1841), especially the russet rusted ones with edges of iron. I watched the sparrows rise off in unison at the rumbling approach of an L train, then gently return flittering close to the ground when the echoes fade. I thought I'd come to confront my fear. I expect death to be gorey, like a Hollywood horror movie or at least eerie like a David Lynch flick. Not this.
Not whistling birdsong. Grassy lawn. Spindly pine and shady oak.
I'm looking at one burial statue -- one of the russet iron ones that taper up to a cross. The three prongs of the cross aren't like arms stiffened straight out, they're flailed like blooming lotuses.
Everything feels like a blessing, not a death curse.
And then I get that buzz that signals a text message. Not any 212 area code number I recognize. Reads:
Does a stencil cut from spacious wholeness die?
I turn around to see who else might be around. The tomb I'm in front of, the rusty tapering towering lotus-petaled cross one, has a surname embossed: Stencel.
I'm mystified. Yeah, alright, maybe a little spooked. Not sure I want to text back (yet?).
Just head home and Google the lines to the poem that Evelyn told me awoke a Sufi master she once met. Except she couldn't really remember the exact phrase. Something about the geese that fly overhead don't mar the lake below. But that's not it.
He was 19 too, she believes. Riding on a train in England.
Finally I find the verses by Zenrin Kushu:
The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection.
The water has no mind to receive their message.
art credits! more in wispy haunting mood of New Orleans art, than Brooklyn tonight... this by Myrtle Von Damitz, and this soothing one too by Myrtle Von Damitz.
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