1.
We’re gathered in the funeral home, your friends
who are not themselves especially friends,
with you laid out on view in the approved fashion
wearing the bright-red reading dress with cut-glass buttons
that wink at the ceiling, when you spring
like a jack-in-the-box from the coffin
crying Boo! I was only fooling!
2.
After the terrible whipping you are
oddly please with yourself,
an impenitent child, the winner.
It’s Daddy Death who’s quit.
Once more you’ve worn him out
from all his lifting and striking.
His belt lies shredded in his meaty fist.
3.
We are standing together in a sunless garden
in Rockport, Mass. I’m wearing the hat
The artist painted you in
and suddenly swarms of wasps
fly up under the downturned brim.
O death, where is thy sting?
Tar baby, it is stickered to me; you
were my wasp and I your jew.
first published in The New Yorker, April 12, 2001, p. 50 then in The Long Marriage, W.W. Norton, 2002.
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