The Rosary

Posted on July 22, 2006 in Childhood Poems

The open casket, the rouged and flooded
cheeks, the eyes stuff with cotton bolls
did not move me to obligatory
obsequy like that that passed from my cousin.
“She looks like she’s sleeping.”

I thought: “She looks like
she’s dead in that walnut coffin.”

The beads rattled through my fingers, prayers
across my lips, a chant that I knew
better than him, that my wife would find so
curiously Buddhist as she faced the bier
of my grandfather on the other side
— years later — in the same Salt Lake City
church where my cousin professed sorrow,
where my brother crossed his arms because he was
an egotist of the highest order,
ranking as an archangel among bats.