In a bad yarmulke, Ben nods His head along with the Service, under His veil under the veil of the sky, dully gray and webbed in fog — to trap the clouds to be sucked of their wet, then left for empty, a sunset’s clearing. As for the veil, it’s not for the stench of death, which has been frozen, but for the mystery, for the delectation of the assembled, the coverage columns fallen wide, a tumbled pantheon of typefaces jumbled, an edifice imposing of hype to raze; and to discourage invited paparazzi kept penned to the rear. Him, He’s perfunctory, disengaged. It hasn’t yet sunk in, and neither them. Without doubt, something must have been offered, some eulogy delivered, memories shared, a sermon, a drash, remarks if not extemporaneous then just scripted to sound; all have agreed, a Kaddish must’ve been said. V’imru, a new translation. Doctor Abuya stands unbowed atop the pulpit of piled coffins, comforted by the Nachmachen armbanded, hooded in black. Der mourns to their left, alongside the Mayor and the President and their wives and the swollen lips of their mistress’ eyes. Ben nods through the lull, the incessant lapping of the wake on the ice, the slow dumb thud thud dulling insensate thud, then the fierce rabid white withdrawal back into the swelled body to flow on amid floes and on further, among the floating glaciers and bluewhite golden bergs that don’t seem to receive or take the light of heaven but hold it, or emanate it, as if they’re but the fallen cooling and cooled flesh of the sun on a flank of the moon. Against this restless ebb, this wake endless, endlessly hazarded with icicled sharps, a slough of badeggy, brownblack pickleweed and sick saltgrass, decomposed phragmite, starvelimbed spartina, and trash above the enabling sink of the previous dead, two Kush attired in the deceased’s ripped, tattered black judges’ robes arise from their chairs, which are seats that’ve been hewed from ice by workers wielding picks at the dawn, and proceed to the bier of coffins stacked low before the coffined pulpit, stoop together toward the white, bend at the knees to bow, to lift the topmost casket: Steinstein small in a cold cocoon. A band plays on a barge far out freed in the open water, so southerly gone that no one hears its music, which has been programmed funereal, joyously sad: accordionwind, flutefog, sounding brass, timbrel with tinkling cymbal. A mandolin plink, the call of birds without sky. That’s no butterfly, He thinks, that’s only winded trash. A leaflet engraved by weather, denoting the agenda of the morning. Rest assured, there will be memorials. Blown city trash. An invitation to a light buffet. This is no metamorphosis. There will be no emergence. This, for however long, is an end.
