You Did Not Attend Your Funeral

by

Lois P. Jones

Her work has been published in state quarterlies, anthologies, ezines and internationally in Argentina and Japan. In 2006, she co-edited A Chaos of Angels (Word Walker Press, 2006) with Alice Pero as well as completed work on a documentary of Argentina’s wine industry. You can find her as co-host at Moonday’s monthly poetry reading in Pacific Palisades, California and hear her in recent and upcoming interviews on KPFK’s Poet’s Cafe and kbeach.org, the university station of CSULB. She is Associate Poetry Editor at Kyoto Journal.

Your ashes in a red velvet bag, so lonely
on the scratched wooden table. And the yellow petals
of the roses we scattered, seemed to spoil before my eyes.

I took the three wing-backed chairs on the stage
and placed a photo of you in each one. My favorite leaned
against your urn. A picture of you with your arms in the air
looking like you’d just returned from a fiesta by the lake.
The "so what" smile so you.

You wouldn’t have liked the rabbi in his ankle-length coat
and wingtips, who constantly asked the time. Brevity, he said
was the keystone of a Jewish funeral. He’d critique
your daughter’s eulogy and my poem—suggest a word here
or there. In the end, he read my notes—a synopsis of you.
He took $300.00.

There was your daughter’s ex-lover kicked out.
The beautiful granddaughter with her smoky tears, the ones
who never visited—the ones too old for winter. And a frail Louie
who came with his portable breathing machine, the sweetest mourner of all.

It was the grandeur of a decayed chapel, flowers and dead relatives
that never arrived—only the pure light that reached us high
across the dome. In the end you left your body
like an old wallet; silk shredded into gauze. Plastic windows
slightly dingy,
beautiful,
spent.