Dressing the Dead
The pickled herring on the salad bar
brings it all back to my grandmother,
the legacy unraveling in her speech
from holds in her body, growths
in her fingers. She speaks of her
mother, who brought home fish still
struggling, wrapped in paper, stunned
flat on the counter with a deft flip
of her hammer. Remembers scales
that jumped like sparks, the knife
worn to a sliver of moon slipped
under gills, through skin slid
off like a silken sack, hiss
of root-beer kegs brewing in the basement,
the baking bread that lured in the poor
they deloused.
ACohen, born to duties
of a priestess, she gave up her gambler
boyfriend for my great-grandfather,
learned to draw blood from meat,
dress out the dead.
In Hebrew the word
you contains all the letters
of the alphabet, symbols which stack up
the house of man.
My grandmother sneaks
a piece of herring from my plate, tells of many
nights she put her sisters to sleep, her
mother alone with the naked dead. Pink
children given up too early to polio
or typhus, women cleaved open to let
out their infants, fathers whose wives
stayed up crying, baking knishes,
kugel, cholent and fish for mourners,
the long week of sitting.
In the synagogue
room empty except for a slab, lit
by sky-blue gaslight, her shadow bent over
a stiff man, dipping into private places
mapped by loving hands, the taut limbs,
vestigial webs between fingers,
caves of armpits, ridged bone, slack
skin, limp sex. For just one night
she had the right to touch what no
woman could. A splay-fingered bather
trapped in a net, struggled over the body,
could spit a single word at the sky.
Beyond
that point there is no knowable, Reshith,
the creative utterance, beginning
of all.
Through the night’s silence
to the hour of burial, she worked
slowly in lamp-light until her shadow
skinned from the wall, funnelled into lips
of the body, fingering over eyes, all-
consuming, blessing, cold.
The flame
like an oil-torch, blackened the ceiling.
She teased brightness from hard skin, sheen
of splendor contained in a sound.
You who
have struck this void, and caused this
point to shine, who have sowed a seed
for its glory, as the silkworm encloses
itself, have made the word house
from head.
Then the shroud she wrapped
bestowed its layered blessing, over
and under, between the legs, around
the belly, arms, benedictive silk tucked
under shadow spread over skin, each
soft horizon returned to its speaker,
his head propped on pillows,
thin mouth stretched in thanks.
She waited for the sun, turned off
the gaslamp, palm clamped on his mouth,
two fingers over each eye, one creation
returning its breath to that first
darkness, the first mourner who sucked
effulgence from the lips of the dead,
tongue out at the stars, meaning,
in you.
The words
you, the sky, cannot be separated,
are male and female
together.
My grandmother holds my hand,
sips her coffee, tells me how she wanted
to dress her husband, to kiss his curves
once more, how his lips needed painting.
His fingers like claws to grasp. Not born
a priestess, she could not sack
his bones, their language, refuse
of creation, in cloth.
"Dressing the Dead" Appeared in Poet Lore 1989, and was reprinted in TriQuarterly New Writersfrom TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 1996. It is available from Amazon.com.
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