- Just days ago the calloused feet,
- unlike the hands, free of tubes,
- moved weakly to the echoes
- of a schottische playing across time.
- Tonight generations circle the open casket,
- the lipsticked face letting them know
- they are no longer orbiting Mama.
- She has left me a chocolate pot
- and a pattern I will not use
- for a life of laundry and devotion
- though I will try, and fail, to
- duplicate her cauliflower crisps.
- "This is what happens to old people"
- says her eldest great grandchild,
- my sanguine son, all of nine.
- And he is right. A good woman
- has left the world, much in years,
- descendants, memories.
- Leaving the viewing room, a door
- opens on another death, the kind
- that does not happen to old people.
- Winter-coated, a man and woman
- arch over a flag-draped closed coffin,
- their heads almost touching,
- damp grief conjoining over whatever
- may be left of a young Marine.
- Semper fi say the gladiolas that will,
- in hours, die as Mama has,
- in the proper course of things.
- There is nothing proper
- in these parents' weighted bodies,
- nor in the hidden remains of their son's,
- bagged home from a jungle
- to be buried in the snow
- he made forts of, not so long ago,
- perhaps when he was nine.
- They hold themselves up
- by the casket handles,
- smooth the stars and stripes,
- as if they were his wounds,
- or the fevers the mother cooled
- when he had the measles, the mumps,
- the charlie horses the father rubbed
- with liniment after football practice.
- Their hands entwine urgently
- as they may have done when
- they made this boy, reaching now
- for a way to deal with his obliteration.
- I grip my son's mitten tightly,
- hoping he has not seen this other death,
- the one that is unacceptable,
- the one that shatters the heart.
