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Published first on The Ekphrastic Review
No one has died yet and it’s unusual.
Well, I admit I’m writing this after a funeral
so maybe it’s unspoken. I took off my nice shoes,
the shiny, black ones, and crumpled onto grandma’s couch
and we’re waiting for something to happen.
It’s North here, the leaves are already changing
against this pavement coloured sky—
lighter than ink but still dark enough to write off the sun.
Someone said it will freeze tonight for the first time
this year. I need to remember to bring in my plants from the yard.
I’ve never seen someone hand out frozen candy on Halloween,
the frigid, filed down edge of a Jolly Rancher is too similar to a razor blade’s.
I wish I worked on a fishing boat in Florida for the inspiration
but I never applied, I’m afraid of drowning.
That’s the thing about it, it can happen anywhere:
oceans, lakes, streams, pools, bathtubs, refillable bottles,
the dog’s bowl, any one of the puddles deepening outside.
This is my first will: Do not cremate me.
I hate dust. But I don’t want a casket or formaldehyde either.
I tried cigarette’s chemical solution in high school and didn’t like them.
Voodoo is the next obvious experiment because I want the owls to speak
Spanish and with their yellow eyes hold the eyes of every remembered dead.
It makes sense, once you understand it, that death approaches like this:
a tangled thicket of arms and soft skulls swaddled in wicker.
I don’t hear the moaning but I see it. The tunnel of light
everyone fears is not the moon, an angel, or even a nightgown,
It’s a pale glow radiating from a handful of descending bones.
The question remains: at which end of the tunnel do you live,
here in fear, or there, where everyone is dying to go?
Modern Haiku Issue 51.1
This poem was inspired and written after Francisco Goya's El Conjuro below.
After a Funeral
