THE AFTERLIFE

                                        (a homily)

 

 

            One is dying indeed when the secret is out

                        and the children gather round the bed

                        each keeping his own counsel.

            For a while, friends think they hear our dead

 

            voices in the marketplace, misled

                        by a strange perfume – then nothing.  Long

                        ago, the unlettered died misread.

            Now 1984 has come and gone,

 

            we all do.  Let us praise in public song

                        the mother whose charred body wrapped

                        her unharmed daughter in her strong

            embrace, the one survivor of a trap

 

            where hundreds crashed and burned.  The usual pap

                        in the Yakville Times had it she just landed

                        on her senseless.  Why remap

            the landscape of our lives, as if to pan

 

            a tasteless rumor?  A crossing guard outran

            our doomed children’s fate.  She flung

                        them to safety and died where she played her hand,

            staking her life for theirs.  Curse the evil tongue

 

            that hushed her fame at once and left unsung

                        her act as a fool mistake, killed

                        her memory while it was young.

            And what of the guttering hope with blazing will

 

            who shuffled into the freshest bend in the chill

                        torrent, breaking out of the warm,

                        smelly void where, often ill,

            stooped and toothless, he served a life term

 

            for a brain that we found wanting in substance or form.

                        The guilt of the warders defended sagely

                        the unlocked basement door, norm-

            ally unused – like him, forgot for an age.

 

            And, “He had the mind of a baby,” to assuage

                        our pity before we could be sure

                        compassion was in us.  Yak turned a page.

            “He was nothing like us, forget it.”  Now immured

 

            in our years, we see that we have been on tour

                        in a time machine.  Toward the end,

                        all we knew has gone, like moor

            and rider from a moving train.  And then,

 

            we ourselves are context.  The man depends

                        on the mask, flesh shrinking from the brazen

                        weight of public comment, blends

            into the pit, at one with its scorn, its praise

 

            or its indifference.  All our days

                        forever after must be spent

                        as radiance or scars emblazoned

            on our confluent worlds.  Oh, sing your discontent

 

            in unvexed numbers, lead a cause, invent

                        the shape of grace – with the purity

                        of Fra Angelico, who lent

            the homely Christian vessel’s history

 

            the glory of his vision, mystery

                        to fill its images of the dull

                        and the deformed – the sanctity

            of Wyeth’s fishing nets hung spread out tall

                        in wings to catch for all to see

            a light that never shined on you and me.