Читать книгу The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible - Walter Wangerin - Страница 7

1. The Evening Vigil

They’ve sewn Odessa’s eyelids

closed,

the lashes the stitching.

The old mortician tried for a smile,

but settled for an inane

twist of her lips.

Once as black and as rich

as a grand-black piano,

Odessa’s complexion’s stained sallow;

eyeglasses askew

on the bridge of her nose

What? The woman wore glasses?

There’s a knoll in Oakhill Cemetery,

fenced to define the plots

reserved for Negroes.

2. Graveside, Afternoon

Rev Leroy and I stand alone

beside the open hole:

“Earth. Ashes. Dust.”

The Rev snaps closed his Bible

and quits the canvas canopy

billowing in the wintry wind.

Two white groundskeepers

unwinch the casket down:

ta-tocka ta-tocka, ta-tocka—

“Hurry up, Joe!

I’m frost-bit!”

3. Dusk

I drive home under the streetlamps

that swing from crossed wires

above the intersections.

The light of a single streetlamp

forms in the air before me

a ghostly cone of snow,

the cone’s low circle

of fallen light

lying on a loose inch of snow.

4. Noonday

A warm Indian-summer sun

melts the snow that last night

mounded Miz Odessa’s tomb,

dissolves the headstone

that should have stood memorial

to the woman’s weary life.