"Unveiling" Poetry Blog (11/13).

UnveilingIn the cemetery
a mile away
from where we used to live
my aunts and mother,
my father and uncles lie
in two long rows almost the way
they used to sit around
the long planed table
at family dinners.
And walking beside
the graves today, down
one straight path
and up the next,
I don't feel sad
for them, just left out a bit
as if they kept
from me the kind
of grown-up secret
they used to share
back then, something
I'm not quite ready yet to learn.
     -Linda Pastan

     This is a very simple poem. It doesn't have any specific or special or flowery structures; it is simply 22 lines of run on sentences. The meaning is not difficult to discern, it is simply about the speaker's family who are dead and in a row in a cemetary where they used to live together. The speaker doesn't feel sad when he walks past their graves, rather a little jealous- as if they are all part of a secret that he can't know just yet. That idea is new to me, and it is different and a little depressing in some ways. The simple structure of the poem seems to fit with the simplicity of death- there's nothing overdone or formal about it, it just happens.
     The antecedant scenario is most likely Linda Pastan contemplating death in a new light or thinking about her passed away loved ones who she has yet to join. Maybe she sees that as being unfair like the speaker in this poem does.