This poem starts from above, inviting us into a familiar scene of grief, then letting us enter viscerally into that grief in a surprising imaginary turn. In its strangeness it is at once unsettling and comforting, like the memory of loss.
With a quiver in my lip and a wobble in my knees,
I stood in front of the open casket
and I looked down at my mother.
With her soft eyelashes and clean fingernails,
she looked like she was sleeping.
I wanted to believe that she was only sleeping.
It was deep in my bones that I knew, though,
that she wasn’t sleeping at all.
It was deep in my bones
that I knew she was dead.
My head and heart just hadn’t caught up with the knowing yet.
As a Jew, I’d never actually considered
the option of cremation after death.
Not until that moment.
That moment standing in front of a mother
who would no longer hold me or kiss me,
laugh with me in times of joy or carry me through pain.
That day, standing in the funeral home,
looking down at her dead body,
I wanted nothing more than to be cremated
and have the ashen dust of me blown onto her,
to coat her skin and the lining of her casket.
To blanket her in a soft coat of the sediment of me.
I wanted her last breath to breathe me
down her throat and up her nose and to fill her lungs.
For her to swallow the grit of me through her teeth
and for it to cling to the lining of her empty belly.
The dust of me to tickle her closed eyelashes.
I wanted to pack myself under her tongue,
inside her cheeks and in between her teeth.
I wanted to live under her nails
and between her dancer’s toes.
In the spaces between her ribs,
and behind her ears so she caresses me
with every tuck of her hair.
Coat the vellus hairs on the backs of her hands.
Weave myself around her slender fingers
so when she put them to her lips
she kissed the ashen dust of me.
Ashen Dust