Location, Location

take the moon with you

and make it wear that democratic white shroud,

pocketless, since rich and poor,

we take nothing with us, save a small stick or dowel

in the casket, so we can all

burrow through the earth to the Holy Land

when the time is right.

Please forgive that I confessed your amusement

at Shakespeare’s “mewling and puking”

in my eulogy. (No one laughed—my delivery was off—

but Otto the Undertaker smiled.)

He told me that when I shovel some dirt onto

your soft wood box,

suggestive of the trees where Eve and Adam hid

from the Lord who called—

what were they thinking?—I should press the shovel

back into the pile

before the next mourner—my husband, not a Jew

once if a hundred times—picks it up because to bury

the dead is a mitzvah

that should not be diluted, each person who performs

the act should get the credit,

which we will need when that Miscreant Angel

comes to collect his chit.

Otto dates my step-second cousin twice-removed

and let me say: I hope

they marry. Someone who guides the bereaved through

such a smorgasboard of ritual

with Virgilian ease deserves as much happiness

as can be gainsaid

in the Detroit metropolitan area, legally. By the way,

ma, we never recovered

your wedding ring and pearls after some gonif

pilfered and pawned them

but trust me, when I find him, I’ll shake him

‘til the rich give anonymous charity

or I’ll walk away from trouble the way you taught me to—

otherwise, it follows you

home and perches near the deli tray without bringing

even a cup and saucer.

Were you ready, ma, when your soul and body

signed their final confession,

the angels acting as scribes? No shomer in Rochester Hills

to stave off ill-tempered

ghosts, ungrateful relatives, rodents, to watch you

until you could don

your guf hadak, the celestial garment being fashioned

while your soul went

back and forth between homes. I must steel myself

like the egg that hardens

when cooked, the egg I salt and bite into, half-

listening to the rabbi’s

easeful voice: together we recite, offering God

consolation for His loss,

though I tell my children that you are with God,

and they repeat it so blithely

and I am so busy with mourner’s occupations—

the burying, the tearing,

the endless repetitions, double-taking every mirror

I pass that offers no vision—

I start to believe what I want to believe: your absence

here is your presence there,

wherever there is, every piece of land a personal

Elysian field, the best room

at the Fontainbleau, pied à terre with an obstructed view

of oblivion, a corner booth

at the Rascal House and the miniature danish taste

like manna, as they always did.