The Twin

My wife and I had cleared away
the fallen branches and encroaching saplings,
had propped up the tumbled tombstones.
We’d discovered Margaret, Mary,
and Sarah, their mother,
all buried within weeks of each other;
the Confederate soldier on eternal picket duty
just outside the cemetery’s boundary;
and the three long graves hidden beneath leaves,
marked by common rocks at head and feet.
We thought we’d uncovered
all of the overgrown graves,
until the old man rattled up
our rutted drive in his pickup truck,
returning after decades to visit his twin,
who, he told us as it had been told to him,
only lived long enough to sense the light,
to reach for the wailing voice of his brother,
to take one breath, first and last.
We followed the old man to the graveyard.
He stopped at its edge and pointed.
We cleared away layers of pine needles
revealing the mound blanketed in white gravel,
a tiny grave the size of a cradle.
We left him there alone
to commune with the brother
he’d last embraced in the womb.
“ You know,” he told us as he was leaving,
“ I’ve been haunted for seventy five years
by his absence, his presence,
yet I’ve never been able in all that time
to decide which one of us
left the other behind.”