Last night several told me how much they enjoyed my drawings now hanging in the Hallwalls members' show, pencil renderings of drive-thrus and mentioned previously in a blogpost when I had a run-in with the fuzz at a KFC.
This week maiden aunt Marion left this world, as did Liz's mom, Anne.
This morning I delivered my homemade floral arrangement to the funereal parlor and was greeted by a doe-eyed man running the joint who was not so sure he wanted to allow me to enter Aunt Marion's viewing chamber. Are you immediate family, was his question. Are you the florist?
I stated (thinking Listen Mr. Important, I've dealt with bigger, burlier and snarlier men than you and won backstage at concerts galore and you're a graham cracker crust compared to them) I'm her niece until he let me in... for god's sake.
Due to the shortage of men in the fam arranged that six nieces will be pallbearers and told various relatives that my aunt would have totally dug this. One cousin, Patty, of Cali, is still not too comfortable with the concept of us pallbearing. The coffin will be on a gurney, on wheels, I said, it's not like we'll be heaving and hoing.
I am going to read Wallace Stevens's Evening Without Angels as a reading tomorrow at the funeral service and think, as I reread it, it's a complicated poem - thematically obtuse though beautiful. There's also one line with a shitload of s's so sibilance will be slithering throughout the vaulted space as I read into the mic.
... Desire for rest, that that descending sea/ Of dark, which in its very darkening/ Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.
Loads of s's.
My dad said It's not a tear-jerker is it? I assured him it is not.
How can a poem that mentions a coiffeur of haloes be sniffly?
It's about how we elevate our lives to holiness, how what we have is our life and the sun and the moon.
It ends
Where the voice that is great within us rises up,/ As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.
Rock on, Aunt Marion, wherever you've floated off to.
And same to you, Anne.
Literary and lifeful love.