Salt and solemn water

Mourning Services

What we say of the dead dies, too. Words uttered by
Caesar, by Xia, by forms dressed in divine festoons
who were given the accordance of such ceremony as
to inter afterlife within the shrouded shape before them.

Remembrance is a prevarication culled from an
architecture of proteins, nothing less. For those
who cannot remember, memories remain intact,
pure, inviolable, but vexingly irretrievable.

When my grandfather lay still as an autumn leaf,
we huddled in the pews, our hardened shoulders
touching the strange familiars of our own family,
salt and solemn water rivered in reverent weeping.



This was the way I thought it was supposed to be.
Their dancing gone suddenly extinct meant sorrow
and the mourning of eras lost to the maraud of our
own lives that whispered swim or be subsumed.

So I swam, pulling hard for the banks, dark eddies
buoying me through fortune’s minerality, fair winds,
surface turbulence, the wisdom of water encompassing
whatever would strike an ill-advised course through it.

I’m older now, toweled off many times, the salt
caked and pleading to be washed off again soon.
What we say of the dead is lost to living as to the
memory of it, unto the felled ruins of forgetting.

Joseph Gallo
August 5, 2014