Philip Levine - My Grave lyrics

Just outside of Malaga, California, lost among the cluster of truckstops there is a little untended plot of ground and weeds and a stone that bears my name, misspelled, and under the stone is dirt, hardpan, more dirt, rocks, and then one hundred and one different elements embracing each other in every way they can imagine so that at times they remind me of those photographs I saw as a boy and which I was a**ured were expensive and stimulating and meant nothing. There are also over a thousand beer bottle caps one of my sons was saving until he calculated he would never reach a million and so quit. (Quit saving, not drinking.) One document is here, ceremoniously labeled "My Last Will & Testament." My sister so hated it shew threw it into the bare hole and asked that it be shovelleed under. Not one foolish hope of mine is here, for none was real and hard, the hope that the poor stalked from their cardboard houses to transform our leaders, that our flags wept colored tears until they became nothing but flags of surrender. I hoped also to see my mother a long distance runner, my brother give his money to the kids of Chicago and take to the roads, carless, hatless, in search of a task that befits a man. I dreamed my friends quit lying and their breath took on the perfume of new-mown gra**, and that I came to be a man walking carelessly through rain, my hair tangled, my one answer the full belly laugh I saved for my meeting with God, a laugh I no longer need. Not one nightmare is here, nor are my eyes which saw you rise at night, barefoot and quiet, and leave my side, and my ears which heard you return suddenly, your mouth tasting of cold water. Even my forehead is not here, behind which I plotted the overthrow of this our republic by means of the refusal to wipe. My journals aren't here, my right hand that wrote them, my waist that strained against so many leather belts and belts of cloth that finally surrendered. My enormous feet that carried me safely through thirty cities, my tongue that stroked and restroked your cheek roughly until you said, "cat." My poems, my lies, my few kept promises, my love for morning sunlight and dusk, my love for women and the children of women, my guiding star and the star I wore for twenty seven years. Nothing of me is here because this is not my house, this is not the driver's seat of my car nor the memory of someone who loved me nor that distant cla**room in which I fell asleep and dreamed of lamb. This is dirt, a filled hole of earth, stone that says return to stone, a broken fence that mumbles Keep Out, air above nothing, air that cannot imagine the sweet duties of wildflowers and herbs, this is cheap, common, coarse, what you pa** by every day in your car without a thought, this is an ordinary grave.