Others Crossing the Grass

There are other leaves
flattened in other doorways,
strange doorways holding strange
people behind them. Strange because you do not
know who they are, and you cannot conceive of that.
Their faces are flattened like the bottoms of
shoes, years and years
old. Who knows
when they were swept there,
and who knows who did the sweeping.
Does that tree even exist anymore?
Is there any way to tell?
What if a tree could become fossilized
sanding up? We’d be in a quarry of
stone trees. A cemetery of heavies.

The steps in the doorway
are drawers full of skulls,
the tops of the heads of the good
ancestors, their houses have grown hair.

I start to think, perhaps that the
paint splattered on the ground is the shape
of their voices, and it was fossilized, hardened like the
skulls.
In the field, others
crossing the grass feel like ghosts,
and it makes me wonder, what if they’re there
only for now, and
then they aren’t there anymore
when I can no longer see them?