It's been a while. Friends came to Maine. Neil came to work with me on the house. Eric joined us for the weekend's work and enjoyment of the gorgeous weather of this last week--clouds with their stuffings coming out; heaven-blue skies; temps in the 70's with breezes from the east holding the scent of ocean that made me sigh. Now I have cleaning and laundry to do. That's the best impetus for me to work on writing. So back to the poems.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Had it been India, we would have
burned your body on a funeral pyre
sun-up to sundown, staying with you,
turning the bones until all are ash.
All day we would have wept, prayed,
chanted together for your soul's safe journey.
But this is mainstream America.
No oparri here to sing your life and mourn,
to flesh out the man we see in the coffin.
We need collected stories
of memories and explanation--
why your hair is flecked with gray
and you dead at twenty-nine.
Here in the funeral parlor
no outward expression but seeping tears,
no scattering of petals nor paintings.
We aunties and uncles
are not the Indian mourners who will
stay with the family, cleaning,
cooking, comforting, playing dice
in between their shifts.
Your mother was dead ten years ago
on the same day you left us.
Your girlfriend wasn't invited
because of family politics.
The solicitous funeral director
funnels our grief
into cans of acceptable behavior.
You were the known child but
the unknown man, Jay,
caught in an irresistible drain of drugs.
You are the story unfinished, the sentence
ending irrationally with a colon:
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