Profession
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.
