Across Nova Scotia
The roads are empty and roll,

The spaces long, graveyards small:
Size of houselots from a factory town.

A geese-flock of headstones.
Sometimes the sea, sunlit, oily,

Just beyond the markers;
Sometimes a church

As white as dice. We've
(Passenger and myself)

Stopped mentioning how small
These graveyards are - the same way

We stopped admiring out loud
That ubiquitous sign

Warning of a "Blind Crest"
As the car motors up a hill -

Doesn't mean we've stopped loving
Both what that sign says

And what that sign does:
Blindness improves a crest:

Same result, different process from
What smallness does for graveyards.

-published in Faultline, Spring 1999