Profession

Wednesday, January 15, 2014
I remember the warp of
trees on the windshields
 
       of cars passing through
       the masculine cemetery.
 
I recall the gothic shorts
worn in those parts by
 
       my so-called kinsmen.
       The collective whisper
 
post-funeral, "murder
in a Japanese forest."
 
       While some die daily
       with diamonds hidden
 
in their vaginas or
vaginas, diamonds,
 
       or as some rise like an
       exhausted heat flag
 
up the fiercest posture
of their hardest phallus,
 
       this one, whose anti-wedding
       we celebrated throwing
 
dirt like honest rice
on a dapper oak coffin,
 
       he fell in a land whose
       language was too large
 
for his tongue. Gone
before we got here, none
 
       saw for sure he filled the
       coffin. We took it on
 
good faith. Which supposedly
is proof of such matters.
 
       The cars file out past the
       headstones, reach the
 
gateway as ants and
move on. The leaf
 
        they shoulder together
        so large it's almost invisible.
 
Naked to the bare eye,
like a dream girl who
 
       grows ever less perfect the
       more clothes she throws off.
 
Only look: the motorcade,
it's driving single-file
 
       backwards. Back to the
       funeral home, back to the
 
hospice, back to the
house where no one
 
       recognizable lived, again and
       again, until one by one
 
they find their own
driveway, and pull apart,
 
      door by wheel by hubcap,
      engine block plucked from
 
its chassis like a
mote from the eye,
 
      hung up in disarray until
      smelted and cooled into
 
the various ores they came
from. Ask again about the
 
     bereaved, the cars, their
     blueprints, the color of
 
their make and what he died from.
It's all but automotive in the end:
 

     one by one by one.

 

 

Wednesday, January 15, 2014