O spring! on whose unfledged leaves it is verily writteneth, ribbed on rib this prayer: All who art hungry, I forget — let them eat us, maybe; let them come and sit and belch and bench upon nothingness both savory and sweet; the table uprooted, the candlesticks barren, spare chairs down here the waterlogged lees of huge diseased cedars; the whole room — basement unfinished, partially unfinished perpetually, diningroom of the forgotten, recliningroom of the unreclinable and unimaged, the subterranean Heaven of heavens — revealed to Ben in mold, maggoty shag, walls mossed luminously, goatbearded, in iridescent filaments of morning…the entire house, even halflit, wildly en-gardened; strangled in vines as wide as halls, seeping reaches of rooms of one dew’s duration, to be effaced by clouds on the evening, wisped away, rustled forgotten, everything to be gotten rid of, junked, yarded and sold, storage unsorted, cycled to waste: cupboards to be bared to space upstairs, pantry left annulled…Ben bereaved. No different set of dishes wreathed in season, breakables and chipware, to be hauled in from the oilroiling air of the garage, down from the attic encrusted in barnacles to gather breath, entombed in their trunks and boxes of board, nailed and ducttaped, at the dawned rug of the stairhead, atop the carpet, wall-to-wall verdure of dust and mold for Hanna to vacuum no more: the rumbling in the distance the motor, the units of the baseboard heating, the basement’s hotwater heater, more like the final echo of the final storm — for today; a tumult of noise, of life woken and doing, a whirr all around, preparation’s stir gathering its pitch at the vault of the sky that arches, restless, never resting…His house itself now a vacuum, a limit of nothingness, a container of nullity, containment of the nil; the bag of the dispossessed to be gathered up at middle night with death at the door, knocking fists; His sole dispossessed possession, a mound of His father’s old briefcases here in a heap, along with Hanna’s purses, brokenclasped, out of favor, without the succor of candy or coin — essential inheritances, emptied of essentials. A stomach, a mind. Expectations of death dead themselves, voided, though their loss, which is the loss of their promise, is not quite as saddening; to be mourned, but mourned humbly: the idea that ritual couldn’t quite make it conscious enough, or explicit, that a year from winter to winter no divine would ever allow or oblige; anniversary desecrated, deprived in advance; the holy random reaffirming its faith in fate while destroying, debasing, our own; how the cycle couldn’t quite get the packaging right — not a bag, calfskin briefcase, or purse, but a nice neat little bundle of empty, wrapped in skin and tied with hair, left forgotten in a basement corner…Him turning the place upsidedown, insideout, and for nothing; Him searching, setting aside, in a fit, a maddened raising of heirloom dust. This basement eternally unfinished, this basement eternalizing the unfinished — its lowliest beetles and spiders and worms, its annelids dumb, search through the abandoned for meaning, night and day; day and night, making their ways through whatever remains. To seek out any prophecy left to rot by the rotted — to mourn a future frustrated in the retrospection of our death.
O God of Mercy, God of Joysey, Protector of the stopsigns, Maintainer of the sidewalks, Guardian of the dumps, we commend ourselves to the charity of Thy asphalt, that Thou shalt grant us rest amid the rarest emissions of Thy firmament; and now let us open wide and say A then let us say Men, and then shut our mouth and its dark globe and be gone from this earth as were Thou those thousands of years ago upon its first Friday and our making. A funeral’s held at the eastern edge of the Island, the rim of the ice backlit with ocean, tainted by city: the cruciferous spires of the Church of Wall Street, the irreligious iron surrounding the hush of the Battery, there a thin slip of trafficked gray, a glimpse unremarkable, you’ll miss it if not careful: Whitehall Street, site of the first settlement of the Affiliated upon these shores…a swath of flowers, irises and roses still tastefully arranged but wilting their dyes, albescent purples, and blues hued whiter; wreathes are sulking, plasticine hollies and firs, evergreen like money, twisted then bent into hearts and circling circular voids, their silence; the sun with its moon the ghost of a ghost to the west and the birds, which fly low and sated, circle overhead lazily and heavied lower in the bowel, preparing to swoop down and peck Him to weeping. As the only one who might officiate, Ben officially demurs, has been advised to, then ordered; leave this to the professionals, son, and get busy regretting, crank out those tears.
