Boneyard Dogs

How does one lay out a dog for burial? Do it wrong and its ghost will circle endlessly, unable to lie down.

Live dogs aren’t permitted in the cemetery. We look for their stone snouts among the angels.

Has anyone considered that dogs may not want us with them in heaven? That we would frighten the wolves?

A cemetery is the last refuge of invisible friends. Here’s someone with a map to celebrity gravesites.

Trees at Highgate need not fear the lifted hind leg. They go wild, permitted every extravagance except death.

I write these notes six weeks later in a silence greater than any in all London, sitting in the darkness, trusting my faithful pen to find the way.