(As requested...IV)

The Dead



At my aunt's funeral, I was small and asked,
Mama, why is everyone crying?
This was more alarming than the black box,
than an unmoving body—the mass
of people distraught.

My mother re-speaks her sister’s words,
Always be good to Charlie.
And resolute, my mother invited ex-brother-in-law
to Christmas Eve dinners, to birthdays. He never
ate any turkey or drank any wine
out of a paper cup except once. He gave me,
the graduate, a card and having endured us,
he left without a word.

I cannot imagine him dribbling the basketball
as reported. His sweat dyed his shirt yellow. Did he
stop suddenly, drop the ball and allow his eyes
to grow as wide as the pain shivering in his veins?

When the doctor could not restore a pulse, he called
the mother and told her that her son's heart
had stopped squeezing.
In the nursing home,
she did not cry into the pillow,
over-starched and not her own.

You don't mess with the dead, my mother says.
We quietly sign the forms that arrived with the will
and do not look at each other.