On Pattern

For Grandfather, in Bangkok I can tell you, sweeping the several jigsaw lizards away from your casket, away from their expert invasions, kneeling by the order of our births alongside the mother-of-pearl mosaics, the family at your death keeps to form, having to act out that love of endings. I can say the little I know of how you lived is your patient gaze in old photographs, surrounded by three generations, most of the spindling offspring back from the States or Australia or wherever they’d been taken, children barely known but abided on holidays. Today I’m told we have to place pennies in the dead man’s mouth to remind us of the portions left behind.You pay the debt, someone says, you give your something solid back, push your currency up against the open,up against the father tongue. It’s the formal silence we love, the hush that’s planned, the good answer, monks, boyish and newly shorn, who know to whip your burial cloth exactly three times over the altar flame to purify countless threads. Who know when to kneel, when to back away from the casket. The casket itself carved patiently, inlaid with the images, portions left behind of silver shrunken disciples, each framed to each then framed again by squares of alabaster scrollwork whittled into black wood: the whole teak surface worried, Grandfather, with carpenter’s gold, splintered, then resplintered, puzzled with lapis. The eastern window’s been slivered open, to make the sun stab the craftmen’s metallic fretwork. The mourners too, suddenly embossed, become dozens shifting to kneel. When a few clouds eclipse the sun, wiping away the borders, the frame and scrimshaw, so that we stand briefly in the room’s darkened largeness, next to me someone whispers, how your vessel is rented, a work to be given back.