We deal with love by dealing with the ones we love, with sickness by dealing with the sick, and with death by dealing with the dead. And.

Wary of being caught unawares, we planned our parenthood, committed to trial marriages with pre-nuptials, and pre-arranged our parents’ funerals – convinced we could pre-feel the feelings that we have heard attend new life, true love, and death.

Still, I wasn’t as certain as I tried to sound. And I wondered why it wasn’t underputter – you know, for the one who puts them underground. Surely to take them seemed a bit excessive. I mean if they were dead. They wouldn’t need the company on the way. Like you would take your sister to the drug store but you would put your bike in the garage. I loved the play of words and the meanings of them.

It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm’s way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things?

Watching my parents, I watched the meaning change, of what it was that undertakers do: From something done with the dead, to something done for the living, to something done by the living – everyone of us.

The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.

I’m more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It’s not a retail experience. It’s an existential one.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker’s background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I’d write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

I’m lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I’ll make the effort.