In those days, back in the hills of Tennessee, you knew why
the church bell tolled at an unusual hour of the day,
sometimes signaling with a few short hammer strokes,
ringing out once for each year of a life now passed.
Someone had to cover the windows and mirrors,
lest the spirit enter and be trapped inside the glass.
Someone had to edge the stationary in black, and to stop
the clocks, as they had stopped for the departed.
Someone had to wash the body, a sacred rite for the closest
of kin, neither to be hurried nor turned away from.
Someone had to stay up with the body, keeping watch,
wildflowers and juniper masking the smell of decay,
mingling with the warm comfort of constantly brewing coffee.
My mother has not forgotten placing silver dollars
on the eyelids of aunts and uncles, of touching
the hand of the deceased in the belief that it would
remove a blemish, which she says it did. But my mother --
having buried her parents, siblings, and two children
at early ages -- is a lifetime removed from that wide-eyed girl,
and from that sepia-tinted world of front porch songs
and white whiskey, of tobacco leaves on bee stings
and a pair of good overalls for Sunday, a Ball jar of pickled
pig's feet and a can of bacon grease above the stove.
She has requested for herself that there be no ceremony,
no tributes, no songs to be song or scripture read,
and above all, no one gazing upon her body.
Perhaps she is simply removing the trappings of this world
in advance, blotting out the unnecessary, the gaps
in her memory becoming the narrowest of bridges now;
her prayers -- whatever they may hold, in whatever
order recited -- require no words to be lifted.
