And should we die before our journey's through,

Happy day! All is well!

—William Clayton

it's viewings, not funerals I won't attend anymore

and what bothers me is not the trail of people who

have to touch a clammy hand to satisfy this head knell

but it is this: my eight-year-old brother still blonde

with finger-length curls started meowing

at me when I should have been terrified of the boxed body

across the room. (and not in any normal fashion) he mewed

with clarity and volume against shuffling masses

reading the audience card in whispers, "he was a good man,"

and piercing, like god, so only I could hear it, and maybe my mother

who only shifted in her floral-print whatever it was.

my brother, now a small cat padding across the room in full march, come,

come ye saints, the actual tune equated to meow mix, he

leaned his head on my knee and at my reddening only meowed

softer, approximating a kitten gondolier for the dead, come, come ye,

paced a warbling line between the bodied room and a row

of folding chairs, no toil nor labor fear, he looked at me coyly

and started verse three, with his back toward my now

shushing mother, and so quietly again to the chair, to my

legs, to the ground and the underground and the hell under,

he meowed, happy day, all is well, the part for parts left to

beetles, cockroaches, companions of crypts is this too much

here too much to say, that i hope they clicked their little

antennae in time, they mulched in the dirge of earth, rhythmically

praising the newly blessed place and company