On Pattern

For Grandfather, in Bangkok

I can tell you, sweeping the several jigsaw lizards

away from your casket, away from their expert

invasions, kneeling by the order of our births

alongside the mother-of-pearl mosaics,

the family at your death keeps to form,

having to act out that love of endings.

I can say the little I know of how you lived

is your patient gaze in old photographs,

surrounded by three generations, most of the spindling

offspring back from the States or Australia or wherever

they’d been taken, children barely known but abided

on holidays. Today I’m told we have to place

pennies in the dead man’s mouth

to remind us of the portions

left behind.

You pay the debt,

someone says, you give your something solid back,

push your currency up against the open,

up against the father tongue. It’s the formal

silence we love, the hush that’s planned,

the good answer,

monks, boyish and newly shorn, who know

to whip your burial cloth exactly three times

over the altar flame to purify countless threads.

Who know when to kneel, when to back away

from the casket. The casket itself carved

patiently, inlaid with the images,

portions left behind of silver

shrunken disciples, each framed to each then

framed again by

squares of alabaster scrollwork

whittled into black wood:

the whole teak surface worried,

Grandfather, with carpenter’s gold,

splintered,

then resplintered, puzzled with lapis.

The eastern window’s been slivered open,

to make the sun stab

the craftmen’s metallic fretwork.

The mourners too,

suddenly embossed, become dozens shifting

to kneel. When a few clouds

eclipse the sun, wiping away the borders,

the frame and scrimshaw,

so that we stand

briefly

in the room’s darkened largeness,

next to me someone whispers,

how your vessel is rented,

a work

to be given back.

Source: Ruining the Picture (TriQuarterly Books, 1998)