The Stranger at the Funeral

The Stranger at the Funeral

A man I didn’t recognize–the unplaceable
and unaccounted fact of the stranger
at the funeral, the vernacular
of the unknown, the quiet danger
of the unplaced in the context
of the intimate, who is this man
in my father’s circle, the complex
map of the life and the scan
of the gathering for his location
in the uncharted map of my father’s life.

[Chorus]
The stranger at the funeral holds
the hidden evidence of the life
you didn’t see–the unknown folds
of a person’s social world, the strife
and the unwitnessed company
they kept in the hours you weren’t there,
the Tuesday poker crowd, the steady company
of the lunch table, the weekday air.

The accumulated hours of the life
that runs alongside your prolific
and certain knowledge, the wife
and child’s knowledge not the total
of the person, the person being also
lived elsewhere, the social
and uncharted, the slow
knowledge of the stranger at the funeral.

I introduced myself. He had known
my father from the unexpected: a bowling league.
The grown and assembled man I knew–who had bowled?
For seven years, every week,
this man and my father, the old
friends of the accumulated, the weavings
of a relationship I knew nothing about.

He told me things I didn’t know–
the jokes, the humor of my father’s weekday
self, the bowling average, the slow
accumulation of seven years of knowing
my father in that unknown and prolific
and undiscovered context.

[Chorus]

The stranger at the funeral
is the evidence of the life
beyond your knowledge–the natural
and quiet, the knife
and gift of the unknown world
of someone you loved.