Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Day 351
3:58 pm
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a plot far south on Western
–
that there then were beaded wrists around my waist,
waiting to press like vices into their own palms,
tears passing over knuckles because it was okay
to cry at funerals, and not so many other over there
places, definitely not by afternoon when we were
famished around the lazy susan of roasted duck
and those chips I let stick to my damp lips just
so I could hear the crackle and feel an ounce of
pain, as if required by the morning procession of
na mu amida butsu…naa…muu…aaa..miidaaa…
someone something in there whispered I should
remember these clouds of smoke were layers I
could keep for colds somewhere someday when
there was no miso soup left to wash over my
playtime in the rain, like the day’s drizzle flitting off
the cheeks of the middle aged regretting what they
said to the dead when they were once long ago
much younger but now lying in some kind sort of
mannequin passing as peacefully sleeping kin, their
doppleganger ready to be in fact actually buried way
over there, up that hill and next to the plots in between
the Matsumotos and the Cisneros, that is where my
grandma said she bought my someday husband and
I a gift, what a gift, to be laid to rest and I knew before
she said it, before the first bell, before the first cough
drop, before the first yellowed hankie, before my heel
dug into the thick red carpet behind the walnut pew, I
could see up that hill that is where they would point and
discuss value and somehow I knew then as I know now
I will be buried like them that lay like that then, there
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tkk
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