I’m Never Told of Family Funerals

Not since the wake when I was 9,
when I stole a cushion from Benny’s couch
and propped Aunt Rose high in her casket,
sliding a Pall Mall between her fingers
and a bourbon tight in her grasp,
all nestled among the amber decades of a cut-glass
rosary they’d looped through her veiny hands,
a relic she’d carried home from Lourdes
the summer after the Salk vaccine,
when the greater aunts said Surely now, the Blessed Virgin
would cure Aunt Rose of polio. No matter.
In the afterlife, I knew Aunt Rose would toss
away her brace, her crutches, and two-step
among the American Beauties; that not even Jesus
could begrudge her a celebratory smoke
and sip of whiskey, once he’d seen her dance.
When they came from the rollicked kitchen
to her casket in the parlor, Uncle Jim laughed
as the greater aunts shuddered and crossed themselves.
Father Mahoney yanked me by my ear to the front porch
and tumbled me into the rain, to contemplate sin
and my vast effrontery to God
I sat in the back of the cavernous old Nash,
and smoked the last cigarette I’d cadged
from Uncle Jim’s coat pocket, coughing and drooling,
praying hard to the Virgin, offering myself up
that I might somehow be saved.
And from that day, the oddest of my dead
have fluttered through my dreams. Sweet nuthatches,
nodding, weet-weeting, so eager to explain.