I wonder if it might have been easier
For you to let go
If you’d just known:
I wasn’t in the process of loosing myself
But in the process of finding myself

Sure, I was on this road for hours
Before I felt like I’d moved
More than just one minute
From where I started
But somehow,
Sitting by a little lake,
And fishing without a fishhook
I finally got a bite
And I began to reel myself in

All of life
(Just a coming and going
From the house
Where I smoked a couple cigarettes
A couple months ago)
Conspired to let a few rocks fall
To the bottom of a river;
To finally let a little bit of water
Flow over this dam
And keep rushing onwards

The Watch
The watch kept right on ticking, as if nothing had changed. It was like a sixth person at the little round marble table. The stone was cold on my arms. The funeral director pushed it across the table. "This was the only thing on him." My aunt took it graciously, set it by the folder full of everything ever recorded about Donald P. Baca, and from that moment on, it drew the eyes of everyone there, irresistible as a corpse, and as gruesome. tick tick tick as if nothing had happened. I found myself thinking that if he were my brother, I would keep that watch ticking forever, change its batteries, a type of insignificant immortality.

Funeral Homes
The air of calm in funeral homes has always disturbed me. It's cloying, somehow. Too strong. Like the overwhelming scent of peony flowers if you put them in a vase- it darkens your whole house with sweetness. I think I resent knowing that my feelings are being influenced by soothing beiges and classical music. A tissue box and a little bottle of Purell sit on every surface big enough to hold them properly. I find that the anticipation of my "needs" as a griever... offends me.

Survivors
Funerals are not for the dead. They are for the survivors.

Tears
Death is not about trying not to cry. You have to hurt yourself with it to heal from it. There is no shame in funeral tears. They, like death, are inevitable and natural. (My own dry eyes, they shame me.)

Looking In
That is the problem with us writers- every private, gauche little moment of impropriety is fuel for our art, and we must record it. (Intrude upon it.)

Paperwork
1953
***: Male
Color: White
How different it was then.

Grown Up
This is the first time my aunt, whose respect I have always striven for, has even asked my opinion on something "grown up". I thought I'd want her to, but I no longer care. Maybe that means I am finally "grown up".

Absurdly
My aunt gives her email to the man across the table: her name, first and last, no spaces, and the number 1. I find myself wondering irresistibly, inappropriately, absurdly, if anybody ever sits here with a "FaIrYpRiNcEsS4963luv4eva" and has to dictate it to him like that...

Mourners
There are 5 of us here. We are all different, in grief. I am on the outside looking in, an observer, offering the perfect hug or well timed touch of the hand because I feel emotions like room temperature, but not like fever. I look in on tears, silence, on the grip like a vice: on the propriety of being personable to a man who knows your brother has just died, as if that- even death! - gives no permission to be less than polished. And one of us is absent entirely, his truancy a palpable response, just as present as my mother's strangled tears. Her shame frustrates and saddens me- I admire the sincerity of grief, especially when I cannot reach it.

You're Here With Me
The funeral director answers his cell phone. He has the same phone as you, ****, and having seen you answer it yesterday, my mind overlays the images strangely, like a double exposure photograph. It should disturb me, but it only makes me miss you- my mind seeks to erase his image and leave only yours.

Age
Everyone looks older, right now- sunken collarbones and wrinkles weighing down faces. As if they age in sympathy that my uncle is finished with that.

Fishhook
My mother struggles against tears like a worm on a fishhook, and it is agony that ****** my arms, in the air and sliding along the walls. It clashes oddly with my aunt- like a still pond- her polished charm and practiced smile don't feel forced, which only makes it all feel more wrong. I know she is struggling inside, too.

Sweetly reaching for my hand
A rattlesnake curls up in yours.
Smiling oh-so-carefully
To hide your poison pellet
Delivered with a kiss.

Platitudes and honeyed words
With fishhook barbs inside them.
Lies disguised as candy bars
Offered out with sticky fingers
Mostly crossed behind your back.

Promising that all is peaceful
And there’s no danger to be seen.
Alarms and sirens drown those words
And say my world is burning here,
And sinking in a morass there.

If only words were scimitars
To slash a way to truthfulness
And cut the evil from the hearts
That proclaim love for one and all
And secretly deliver hate.
ljm

Fusty walls and shadows
Left mice in the lurch
They said „no!“ to Kafka
On that day when a man in pajamas walked
In front of his house
And secretly eated
Fresh autumn grapes.

Boy with a fishhook and pieces of bread
Was hunting frogs near the coast
While Kafka went from door to door
People were offering him a glass of maple juice
Or just watched him in silence.

Shadows were whispering Judge's vanity name
And frogs were moving in the mud
Kafka’s leather bag
Went carried by a river
In searching for peace.

Table,

My father and I sat
In our timeless silence
That brewed away beneath the lights
Like a sweat that never breaks.

Sister and the Stranger
Sat flanked by pillars,
With two full glasses of
Blood-lit wine
Simmering warmly like
Lamb's hearts
Dropped into bowls.

Never do I love my sister more
That when she wears that little fishhook
Of a smile,
A grim refusal of her lips to flicker down,
Making mincemeat of photographers,
Men in bad jumpers,
And garrulous psychopaths.
It was crueler than any frown.
Far more efficient.

The Stranger buttered her bread-roll all at once,
(A damning thing to do this afternoon)
And dinner turned to coffee
Without a hitch.
I noticed that the whole evening was
Done in a deliberately cut-glass way -
Two siblings painting themselves
Into the people they never wanted to be,
To make a ******-minded point.

She’s not one of us.
She’s nothing like us.
She’s nothing like mother -
Absolutely nothing like mother!

And as we stood waiting for the car
My sister turned to me and said –
“I thought my expectations of daddy were low.”
She swiped at her flapper-girl haircut,
“Turns out my expectations
Have a basement.”

We only notice class
When we need to shut someone
Out.
We only notice class

When it's all we've got.

The newspaper called my father
a Tonsorial Expert and
a Smiling Gentleman
My father whose head is like
a Christmas tree lot on
New Year's Day and
whose mouth was like a rainbow
photographed in sixty-four shades
of gray but
that might have been my fault
even at six
that might have been my fault

He had done
a nice job of hairstyling
according to the pleased
customer, Mr. Holmes
just as he would do
a nice job of mopping floors and
a nice job of rewiring classrooms and
a nice job of growing weaker each day
growing hunched like an unused fishhook but
that might have been my fault
even now
that might have been my fault

The wind howled outside of the lean to and Brian knew that it was only a matter of time before the chill settled in and the last breath of life would leave his body. He thought about his family back in the city and he could not bring to mind any bad times tho he knew that there were many. He thought of his marriage and how beautiful his wife had looked on her wedding day walking down the aisle escorted by her grandfather who had a tear in his eye. He remembered the way her dress and her hair flowed behind her as if there were some slight breeze that had hit her at just the right angle to make it possible. He remembered trying not to cry and to only smile the closer she got to him and how he nearly lost his composure when her grandfather handed her off to him. Brian thought of their first born who he called Maggie but  was named Magnolia by both parents and his wife still used that name. She would be turning sixteen this year and he had not been around as much lately as he had liked but he felt that she knew he would always be there. A tear rolled down the wind bitten cheeks of Brian and began to slow once it got close to his chin, partially leaving a frozen trail from eye to tears end. He thought about Maggie as a little girl, perhaps around the age of five, and the fishing trips that they would take out on the lakes of Minnesota. He remembered the first time that she had baited the fishhook herself and how proud both she and he were when she had caught a ten pound walleye with that same hook. Brian wanted desperately to hold onto that moment for the rest of his life and swore he would never forget and all thruout the years of his life it was one memory that we went back to anytime he felt low and out of place with everyone and everything around him. Brian thought of his two sons, Jameson and Benjamin, twins that could not have been more different. Jameson was great at sports and thrived on competition where Ben was more artistic and would often be found doing volunteer work. Tho they had many differences, they were brothers thru and thru and never had a bad moment together. Brian and Ruth Ann had raised there children right; he knew that much was true and felt the pang of sadness pierce his heart as he felt the anguish of his wife when she heard the news that he was dead and she would have to finish raising them alone. He knew she would do just fine and he wanted to tell her so, to comfort her somehow even tho he wouldn't be around but he had no way of doing so and instead shivered beneath the lean to and continued thinking of his family to keep his mind active. After a short while tho he felt his brain slow and the memories became distant like dreams do after a few moments of being awake. Brian closed his eyes tightly and forced himself to think and focus. He thought about the last family photo that they took and how grown up everyone was becoming and how much love was still in his wife's eyes and he lied down on the cold ground with that image in his head and he slipped into a sleep from which he knew he would not wake up from but still he smiled at his memories and hoped that even without him his children would continue being happy and would grow further and start their own families which would have their own families and so forth. He hoped his wife would be strong and keep on and if she should find someone else he hoped she would not let Brian be the thing that kept her from living. Before Brian exhaled his last breath, he saw Maggie baiting the fish hook and smiling the way a child does. Brian smiled too and slipped into death.