Funeral Portrait
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The Poem
Funeral Portrait
She is bathing in the light.This is what devotion looks like from the outside —face turned upward, gold falling down,the surrender of a person who has found the thingthat tells her what to think about everythingand has never once looked behind her at the wave.
The island.The specific isolation of a person surrounded by the faithfulwho is nonetheless entirely alone —because the faith has replaced the thing faith was supposed to lead you toward:other people. Their complexity. Their inconvenient humanity.Their refusal to be simple.
She is alone on the island. In her chair. In the gold.
She is bathing in the light
The wave is behind her.The monument rises from the sea.It always rises from the sea —the cult of the cult, the monument to the monument,built by the faithful to honor the faith that replaced what faith was for —rising while she looks up,rising while the wave builds,patient as everything that knows it doesn’t need to hurry.
The balloons.Celebration or funeral — the same colors, doing different work,depending on whether what is happening has already happened or is about to.From here you cannot tell which.
The dog can tell.He is running — not away, not toward, but through,the way dogs move through the world that humans have made complicated —with the complete attention of a creature that sees the wave,knows the wave, and keeps movingnot in denial but in the faith of something that understandsmotion is the only honest answer to most things coming at you from behind.
The dog runs
The dog is the hope.Not because he can stop the wave —because he is not standing in the chair in the gold light looking up.
The wave builds. The gold falls. The monument rises.The balloons hang in the sky that is too beautiful for what is happening beneath it.The dog runs.
The faithful never know if it’s a celebration or a funeral until the wave arrives —
which is, it turns out,
how the wave prefers it.