The Mourner's Fare, and: Permanent Collection

The Mourner's Fare

The mourner's fare is half off and minus this miniature bourbon    for which the flight attendant refused to let me pay.

An hour yet to go from one dark, wet city to another    and a black-and-white photocopy of a death certificate

On thin paper in my jacket's breast pocket, and I'm done.    Done talking, done listening, and done with the man

In the seat next to me, who has covered, in detail,    his biography—Kansas to California, wife, divorce,

A job I couldn't make sense of—up to the present    and now, of all things, won't stop talking about Jesus.

After everything, I haven't the heart, or the spine,    or whatever it would take to tell him the moonless black

Screaming past the window and the rattle of ice    in a plastic cup is the only sermon worth listening to

Here in pew 25a, where the reading light's off    and someone's swapped the hymnal for a copy of SkyMall.

And just when he's getting to the part about my sins,    paid for in advance, he says, a synthesized bell

And a voice chime in from the overhead panel,    warn us things are about to get rough not two seconds

Before what feels like a straight eight-story drop, Coke cans    and little offerings of pretzels scattered everywhere.

And then it takes a moment to realize that this man    has clamped his pale hand down onto my own,

That he is not letting go, that his breath, everyone's breath,    is held, suddenly, in anticipation of that final, sheer descent,

Its chorus of emergency buzzers and the miraculous    appearance of a flimsy Sacrament in the shape

Of a yellow plastic oxygen mask no one has any faith in. In the end, we all exhale; in the end

It's nothing, a little more turbulence and the senses returning. In the end the man up front, benevolent always,

Carries us through, though we've not a single thing    left to our names, save the cargo of our own precious lives.

Permanent Collection

I kept a few things: a cylinder of crimson sealing wax,    a handful of cut and tumbled and polished stones,

And a custom-made rubber stamp from which rises    a cracked and ink-stained signature no one

Will ever sign again. I don't know why he needed any of it,    my grandfather, a man who, so far as I know,

Wore one of two pairs of overalls every day of his life. And I don't know why I needed it, though at the time,

Dividing up what remains of a man, it seemed important    that some things too worthless to even be considered

For sale not be consigned to the eventual archeology    of the county landfill. What would the future guess

About a man who kept a broken drill bit of every size,    mason jar lids with spoiled seals, and fifty-gallon drums

Of unsorted rock collected from the continent's western third?    Even the most generous interpretation seemed

A little inhumane. As if some meaning could be divined    from this thing or that thing, as if they could be anything

But reminders we only ever half-believe we must go    from this place, that all our work amounts to nothing

More than an estate sale or a thrift store's jumbled racks.    And of course, I'm guilty of the same thing, having placed

These few small keepsakes on a shelf where I'll see them    sometimes in passing, where they'll play as lesser figures

In an incomplete mythology I'll build up around them,    where they will be still, be dusted. They are

My own unfinished work now, a handful of minor plot points    in another volume of a story no one will read. It too

Will gather dust in the Permanent Collection, its call number    misfiled, its binding unbroken and unremarkable.

At the front desk, Eternity's librarian is weaving a pencil    back and forth through her delicate fingers or building [End Page...