Denise Duhamel
Funeral
I press a thimbleful of dirt
into your belly button
then plant a daisy seed.
Small Window
We lived next door to Fenetre’s Funeral Parlor where several times a week we saw wakes, coffins, floral wreathes, cars with lights on during the day, ladies in black veils, men in their suits, a priest. Crying and nervous laughter, tissues dabbed around the eyes. My sister and I were supposed to stop fighting or screaming when we saw such displays—out of respect, my mother said. Families came to arrange funerals in jeans or housedresses, someone holding a garment bag with the clothes the deceased would wear when put in the ground. An endless supply of the dead. A good business, said Mrs. Fenetre, who went to the supermarket like everyone else, whose own children were grown and moved away.
The Fenetres prepared the dead in their basement which had a small window the size of a TV screen near the ceiling, the other side of which was low to the ground on their lawn, right at the house’s foundation. I could crouch and look inside when the light was on. The embalming table, the mortician massaging the body. The faint sound of a radio, the mortician singing along. The blood drained into a bowl. A needle and thread up through the nose and back down again to keep the mouth closed. Mrs. Fenetre fussing with hair and make-up, as though the corpse was a doll. Each dead stranger became less strange, like a newborn.
My sister said she wanted no part of it and would not look through the window at death. And then the string of people we did know—the boy who crashed his dirt bike, the girl with leukemia. How the ones familiar to me became less so. When my grandparents died, I didn’t dare peer to see them dressed for the final time. They were displayed in the Fenetre’s front room—powdered, with lips red as jam. I imagined what it was like for my father by imagining what it would be like for me when he died. I felt so alone as I held his living hand.
And what must have it been like for the families seated in the hearse to look from their own darkened window to see me untouched, jumping rope, my sister crouched and drawing hop scotch squares with blue chalk.
When I Am Lonely
I go to the message boards
where others feel the same way--
their longings and frustrations,
their inability to make themselves
understood, their inability
to understand their rage
in the moment. How they
only understand when they
look back. I never post.
Someone writes:
Hurt people hurt people.
I sit there like a newcomer
at a twelve step meeting,
not sure if she’ll be back.
I sit there, a reluctant voyeur.
The problem with being
authentic is being authentic:
Here is the sweetest thing
I’ve ever said. Now
here is the meanest.
Stew
You work from your cruel toolbox, your hands blue with cruel tattoos. You pass through in your Subaru on your way home to chew your cruel gruel. You learn another language--Voulez vous cruel?—then travel: Istanbul, Peru, Timbuktu. But still you can’t eschew cruel.
Women misconstrue your Phillips screw, and fall in love with you. When you say adieu, they practice their own cruel voodoo.
You play with your foolish kids—cruel hula hoop and their hullabaloo. You establish for them the rules of cruel. Déjà vu, the dual nature of cruel.
You dive into the empty pool of cruel, become the broken neck ghoul of cruel.
__________
Denise Duhamel is the author, most recently, of Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005) and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001.) Guest editor is for The Best American Poetry 2013, she is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.
Funeral
I press a thimbleful of dirt
into your belly button
then plant a daisy seed.
Small Window
We lived next door to Fenetre’s Funeral Parlor where several times a week we saw wakes, coffins, floral wreathes, cars with lights on during the day, ladies in black veils, men in their suits, a priest. Crying and nervous laughter, tissues dabbed around the eyes. My sister and I were supposed to stop fighting or screaming when we saw such displays—out of respect, my mother said. Families came to arrange funerals in jeans or housedresses, someone holding a garment bag with the clothes the deceased would wear when put in the ground. An endless supply of the dead. A good business, said Mrs. Fenetre, who went to the supermarket like everyone else, whose own children were grown and moved away.
The Fenetres prepared the dead in their basement which had a small window the size of a TV screen near the ceiling, the other side of which was low to the ground on their lawn, right at the house’s foundation. I could crouch and look inside when the light was on. The embalming table, the mortician massaging the body. The faint sound of a radio, the mortician singing along. The blood drained into a bowl. A needle and thread up through the nose and back down again to keep the mouth closed. Mrs. Fenetre fussing with hair and make-up, as though the corpse was a doll. Each dead stranger became less strange, like a newborn.
My sister said she wanted no part of it and would not look through the window at death. And then the string of people we did know—the boy who crashed his dirt bike, the girl with leukemia. How the ones familiar to me became less so. When my grandparents died, I didn’t dare peer to see them dressed for the final time. They were displayed in the Fenetre’s front room—powdered, with lips red as jam. I imagined what it was like for my father by imagining what it would be like for me when he died. I felt so alone as I held his living hand.
And what must have it been like for the families seated in the hearse to look from their own darkened window to see me untouched, jumping rope, my sister crouched and drawing hop scotch squares with blue chalk.
When I Am Lonely
I go to the message boards
where others feel the same way--
their longings and frustrations,
their inability to make themselves
understood, their inability
to understand their rage
in the moment. How they
only understand when they
look back. I never post.
Someone writes:
Hurt people hurt people.
I sit there like a newcomer
at a twelve step meeting,
not sure if she’ll be back.
I sit there, a reluctant voyeur.
The problem with being
authentic is being authentic:
Here is the sweetest thing
I’ve ever said. Now
here is the meanest.
Stew
You work from your cruel toolbox, your hands blue with cruel tattoos. You pass through in your Subaru on your way home to chew your cruel gruel. You learn another language--Voulez vous cruel?—then travel: Istanbul, Peru, Timbuktu. But still you can’t eschew cruel.
Women misconstrue your Phillips screw, and fall in love with you. When you say adieu, they practice their own cruel voodoo.
You play with your foolish kids—cruel hula hoop and their hullabaloo. You establish for them the rules of cruel. Déjà vu, the dual nature of cruel.
You dive into the empty pool of cruel, become the broken neck ghoul of cruel.
__________
Denise Duhamel is the author, most recently, of Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005) and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001.) Guest editor is for The Best American Poetry 2013, she is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.