The Wake
They laid him out in the front room like the old days called for,
the flowers on the casket and the neighbors filing past,
the whiskey on the table and the old sad stories shared for
the man who’d held the room whenever he was last
to leave a gathering, who told the same four stories
every time and everyone pretended not to know
the endings, who had earned his catalog of glories
of the ordinary kind that ordinary men bestow.
At the wake we tell the stories of the living,
we put the best face forward and keep giving
the man a chance to be himself one final time through us,
the laughter and the crying making no fuss
at the wake we tell the stories of the living.
My aunt arrived at midnight from three states away
and told the one about the car and the ditch,
and everyone around the table started to sway
with the laughter of it, every particular niche
of the record hitting in the right familiar place,
and for a moment he was in the room again,
the record was his presence and his face,
the wake its own communion of the men
and women who had known him at his best and worst.
The Irish invented it or so they claim,
the keeping company with the body through the night,
the drinking and the crying all the same,
the long vigil of the grief done right.
I understand it now in ways I couldn’t at twenty:
the wake is not for the dead but for the living,
the gathering the thing we keep in plenty
to prove to ourselves we are still giving
life its full attention past the loss.