OAK HILL, WEST VIRGINIA
- Robert Cooke, 1929-2017
“Great louts are necessary
at funerals,” Julian Barnes
wrote in Flaubert’s Parrot,
a book I had just read—
in fact, it was in the car
I’d parked at the cemetery—
and so I thought of that,
some witty argument
to shore up against grief.
My friend had lost her father,
and although he wasn’t mine
to mourn for, I’d revered him.
I stood there as his grown
children traded jokes
about their Gregory Peck
look-alike, coal-country
barber’s son who’d risen
to glory as a doctor.
Remember how Mom said
(they said again) that Da
had been elected second-
handsomest man in college?
(A pause, for full effect.)
Who was the other guy?
At last came two great louts,
two bruisers in T-shirts
(one of which read PROUD
TO BE AN AMERICAN)
hired to sink the weight
of the old man’s coffin
into his native soil.
No, a small box of ashes.
The louts respectfully
lowered it, then their heads.
Why, really, were they here,
or the last-minute preacher?
A skinny boy aswim
in a man’s threadbare suit
and just a little lame,
he walked up with his cane
like a bishop’s scepter.
Everything off-kilter,
beginning with the hint
of atheists among
the party that had hired him,
and then there was that key ring,
gigantic, dangling from
the belt that barely held
his baggy trousers up.
At last his volume too
went up. His voice was clear.
It’s been a year... I’ve kept
wanting to say something,
anything, so true.
He said he saw his father
in his own shaving mirror.
Just that; made the claim
our images don’t vanish
wholly, or at once.
And when he had to end
by calling on Our Father
in his Kingdom, I even thought
(not laughing, not entirely)
He’s got Saint Peter’s keys.
Then we all shook his hand
and the hands of both the louts.
I walked back to my car,
lump in my throat, not quite
able to tolerate
my loutishness, and prayed
for the hidden, vivid face
that smiled at me in childhood.
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