—Buena Vista Park, San Francisco
There’s no room for the dead
in this small city, nearly an island,
where we trade corpses for houses
digging up graves
and exhuming the bones.
You can die in San Francisco,
but you can’t keep the real estate.
On a path toward the hospital
gutters laid from headstones
names split from dates.
I visit to read fragments
cursive of another century
spelling out a memory:
Frances, loving Mother.
Many names I’ll never find.
They were turned to face the earth.
© Keith Ekiss