WEBVTT

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"After the Funeral"

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A white cat has come to sit
on the back side of slaughter,

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To sit on a white bull bearing
a necklace of pomegranates.

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The cat has come not as any
witness to a crucifixion

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Or a coronation, not as Angel
or symbol of some comfort

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Creature, some benign
break in the dying,

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But as human wish, as
distraction from suffering.

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My human wish: to keep
my father's schizophrenia

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In his casket, to keep
that below the earth, one

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from another,

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Now and forever.

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In season and out.

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From mountain to mountain.

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In the trees and after.

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Amen.

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Everything has come back to
prayer, sitting in that delay,

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'Harrowing the fixities', my
father in me, and my clock,

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My hoof, my feather,
and the sprawling

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Armature and stars of I am.

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Lord am I worthy?

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Have I devotion?

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What body built?

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Of flood, of cancer,

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Of winter, of woman--Lord,

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I pray as I've been
taught--to keep nothing

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From my tongue, its
palm, its golden mind

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So it bees and be's
with whatever it

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be's--rose, rain--Lord,

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Even her, even her who
rises from his bed,

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The naked two-ness of her
filling the room such that she

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becomes the room--

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Lord, am I ready?

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How shall I bear the coming
madness if it is to come?

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What disaster will I
deliver to my daughter?

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My human wish:
distraction: a white cat,

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Balanced on the back
side of a bull, slaughter

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Far off, this delay,
Lord this delay I offer,

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Because I own neither houses nor
land, have not hundreds heads

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Of cattle or of State grazing on
grain in a golden-green field.

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Keep this coming distant,
this sickness underground,

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And if Lord I am,
to bear madness,

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Become the father who
scratches the raw earth

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With his hoof and
snout, plowing the field

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As ox or ass because
the mind says go, go

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Into the pasture not as
ox or as ass but go, Ox,

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Go, Ass, then Lord, let me
into the field, but make,

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Lord, Diviner of the Snowflake
and master of fragments,

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A light, a golden
light in the tree,

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And there have my daughter
stare at its working

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The darkness in the green,
in the leaves and red blooms,

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While I, behind her,
lick the tines of a fence

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And leap in the dust
in front of a white cat

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That has become my
master, that I follow

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Out to a white bull bearing
a necklace of pomegranates.

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