If you can bear it so, be dead

among the dead.  The dead are occupied.

Rilke

After they washed my body

and threaded my arms through the sleeves

of a dress I’d bought in the thirties

in a Cuernavaca market, they looped a rosary

around my folded hands. A bloom

from the bougainvillea is tucked behind my ear.

I am dressed for church; I am beautiful

in death. Oh, the perfume of my hands

rises from me like prayer.  I am gone, yet here

I lie waiting for the man

to come for me, to wrap and box me,

to burn what’s left.  Unusable,

this brittle spine, these still feet.  

Unusable, these folded hands,

hands that tended, arranged,

wiped clean floors cleaner still,

hands that chose the melon,

sliced and served it, threw out the rind—

the unusable rind.

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 I know there are others; I’ve seen their traces

on your clothing, the scratches, the bruises.

Cara Mia’s mahogany curls clung like burrs

to your sweater. Three years with Neith,

who ran off to the islands and never returned.  

Clara, that minx, left a sail-shaped scar

on your scalp, but Circe took the tips

of two fingers. I can’t forgive her.

Each night the scent of varnish, cedar,

your pockets full of bungs and tarnished

hardware the same verdigris as your eyes.  

Each night a transient restoration—

you swing in gimballed sleep between

sole, overhead and ceiling,

between forepeak and lazarette,

and I, your tender, ferry you

back to the morning shore, to the ones

who await the chisel and the plane

in your steady hands.

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A bride and a groom and all their white attendants

are posing on a boardwalk full of people dressed for winter

walking slowly through the afternoon’s lengthening shadows,

leaning on the intricate wrought iron fence, looking out over

the Saint Lawrence as the tankers haul fuel to Québec.

The groom is a captain in the Royal Canadian Navy, the bride

is underdressed.  A gust from the river billows her lace overskirt,

toppling the flower girl who’d been swinging

her calla lilies like a censer.  The photographer leaps,

leads the girl out of frame, crouches again.  We cannot hear

what he says to the couple, as the wind has turned

and a piano tuner’s stutter-step peppers the air.   

It’s almost fog, the way the notes wrap around them.  

Now the groom steps in front of his beloved, takes

her reddened ears in his hands, blowing gently over her face.

Just like this, a man blows the froth across the surface

of a cup of hot chocolate before he begins to drink.

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We knew the holy. It lived in the temple,

in the hymnal, in the minaret;

it dawned rosy-fingered on calendars,

sat fatly, thumbs to fingertips-- a bronze lozenge.

And oh the chorus of halleluliah grotesques,

the ecstatics and the bleeding agonists!

Always with the holy goes the saint and the sinner

both righteous thought and horrible deed

in the name of…     In the name of…

We knew the holy, the way to summon God,  

its modest flame flickering in the stone bowl

in the gold and the gilt and the gilded,

in humble food and drink

arranged on vaguely pelvic dishes

for sacrifices, for offerings…the bells

buttering every rough surface.  Bells appealing,

urging, easing God’s path to our village.

We knew holy madness and holy goodness

and the berm between them.

Now the choirs sing only to each other,

and murderers steal martyrs’ garments,

favoring bombs to bells.

Bombs swanned across continents,

bombs swathed like jewelry, swaddled like babies.  

Pat for bombs, wand for bombs, palm bombs.

We knew the holy as we’ve come to know grief--

abiding companion. Grief labyrinthine.

Yet God endures.  And God’s remove endures.

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