Except of course it's Sunday. (Keeping promises as best I can):
My father was buried
at his request
in a "simple pine box"
which costs $3,000 a fact
explained to us
his legitimate children by
his old childhood friend,
the mortician, a man
dying of emphysema.
It was the penultimate
joke he played on us
leaving us to calculate the portion of
our meager inheritance that
was now going to house his
cancer-silted bones.
There is no such thing as
a simple pine box he announced.
Daddy, of course, with his spendthrift’s malice,
at war with his love of money,
would have known that and yet
insist that he be buried in this way
as if he wanted God to recognize in him
an essential humility that had been
so betrayed by the many years of
voracious profligacy.
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