How Like a Winter, and: Coffin Shopping, and: Emergency Contact Information

How Like a Winter, and: Coffin Shopping, and: Emergency Contact Information

How Like a Winter

She spent the days of December reading
Shakespeare's sonnets. Sleepy icicles dripped

from her eyelashes, but she kept reading.
Her family decorated the tree

while she sat in the leather chair reading,
opening Vendler's book when ideas failed.

She wore a discolored sweatshirt that read
Shakespeare's Muse, carried a Mont Blanc pen

behind her ear. You could see her reading
in midnight mass near the back of the church.

While the believers knelt and prayed, she read
and worried about forgetting to shop.

The city was Christmas ghosts, lights of red.
She was buried in the snow of sonnets.

Coffin Shopping

She touches
a casket and yawns.
Death is a long overdue
nap. She likes the pale satin,
not the minty-green box. She wants
a home in the afterlife that is worm-
resistant and a contraption to signal
the world if she is buried alive. Her
husband tells her this never happens,
still she says she heard a story about a
grave they opened in Kent and inside
the coffin they found scratch marks
in the fabric of the lid. She wants
to be buried with a cell phone or
a string attached to a bell placed
above the ground. Her husband
says people will bother the bell,
the silver could attract crows.
She says these coffins remind
her of Vegas where every-
thing is too shiny. They
leave with the pamphlet
for a classic pine box.
Driving home, they
notice the sky seems
to roll on forever
without any clouds.

Emergency Contact Information

Nevertheless its steps can be heard. . . 

—Pablo Neruda, "Nothing But Death"

In case of accident, call a priest,
               or so reads the back of
my Saint Christopher medallion.

And I want to engrave:
               Or 911. Or an ambulance,
but not just the priest.

I know the priest would come,
               offer everlasting life and pray
over my body, but I'm betting on the medic,

the EMT, the blonde girl who works weekends
               at the fire station just to have enough money
to keep her daughter in private school.

I put my faith in the hands of these saviors
               before I'll kiss the white collar
of the man who loves God the same way I love life.

I'm not ready to go. Not now.
               Maybe when my body begins to crumble,
and it takes every speck of energy to leave

a chair or revise a poem, then I will say:
               Just the priest please.
But for now, call anyone

you think could help, anyone
               who could pull me from the land of afterlife
where "eternal bliss" sounds lovely,

roaming the clouds with dead relatives
               or wandering a white fog
with a friend who died too young.

I imagine yards of cotton unrolling.
               God is remodeling the space
for the eighty million new souls

who will visit this year, souls appearing
               through the restored wrought-iron gate.
It will be interesting to encounter people

who have passed before me. I'll make a point
               to ask Neruda about death
dressed as a broom, as I keep believing I'll be swept up.