And this is a poem that got incorporated
into the introduction.
So I'll take the opportunity to read it in full.
This is called Funerals.
There was the one we planned in the parking lot.
Gear shift forgot in neutral, motor over hot, stunned sunset
blinding off the diagnostic complex.
The one from behind the radiation lid,
his hand snuck out to my protected plastic chair listing
finger to finger his favorite hymns.
The one in the dim drip of the chemo ward,
the onco nurses shushing to raucous list of uninvites.
The heavy art of giving grief some wieldy order
finds relief in much revising.
Its gravity leavened to a new genre.
Even grief itself softens and barbing as each black dress
falls out of fashion, as each floral sprays' carnations brown
and curl as every evening adds it's soft amen
to this protracted requiem.
But in all the breviaries in the dirges, in the obituary pages,
and the eulogies of strangers, there
is no form for what I have become.
Half widowed so far before my widow head.
Unhusbanded, unfutured, uncondoled.
Under the door hospital fluorescence, a pall settles,
tender and indiscriminate.
Into its keeping, I might everything commit.