Funeral In Chico

The sun is red this morning
and the smoke hangs heavy in the sky.
The grasslands are burning
and there is nothing to do, but inhale.
My hands and feet are swollen
and the stiffness makes me wonder
is this what it feels like to die, and dry up,
then burn in blue flame and be no more?

The day of the funeral we pack boxes of mementos:
high school yearbook, Navy flags, work overalls-
and carry the things that wont fit- a rod iron bench
lifted from the front yard- and try to reconstruct the story
of a dead man from the hallow remnants.
All day I sweat in my red dress,
perspiration rings my underarms like ripe melons
and the heavy curtain of fabric sticks to my thighs
when I stand and approach the podium.
The microphone is adjusted and readjusted
and all the flat words sound like they come from another mouth.

Do you know the cost of dying?
More than marriage or birth.
Fifty sleepless nights and thousands spent
to eulogize the dead to death.
I cringe at half truths about suffering and salvation
and barely force myself to exchange
pleasantries with the strangers of family.
Even when it's over
it's not over.
All day and night the telephone rings
and the stream of visitors beat against the front door.
I want to crawl into a borrowed grave
and ask for borrowed peace.

I lay in the backroom, under the ceiling fan and listen
to the meaningless ebb and flow of sounds from a distant world.
Sweat soaks through my underwear as I stare,
glassy eyed at the world

Outside
hummingbirds dip their delicate beaks
into the nose of blooming flowers,
ripe figs are ready to explode, their purple skin
pulled taught over sweet pink flesh,
and the fertile ground, which so easily yields up
sun ripened tomatoes and sweet basil,
is ready to give itself over and over,
without apology, to the cycle of things.
I wish, more than anything, to forsake
taxing human contrivances,
to rise and fall like the hummingbird,
to be as beautiful and fully consumed
as the grass that was
and is no more.

Finally, I understand, if nothing else,
that all nature desperately years for consolation.
Even these lines are part of the striving.
There is no right way to be helpless
or to try to understand what it all means:
a funeral in Chico, California,
the red sun in the sky,
figs and hummingbirds,
a poem I do not know how to end.