I love to shift pictures around,
to watch how they react to new
combinations.
BARON HANS HEINRICH THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA

They are driving into snow. Up ahead
a huge man trudges. He wears a raincoat
and wingtip city shoes, enormous shoes,
and he walks as a man of that build
would walk. We understand he is a good guide:
he doesn't speak and doesn't feel the cold.

We sit on the porch swing and retell all this:
that they are driving to the family graveyard—
the groom, the bride, her mother hunched
in the front seat, her father wrapped in furs
in the back. One of them is dead; we don't know
which. An hour ago the old man was grumbling.
Now he is quiet. “He smells like he's shit
his pants,” his daughter says, and no one
disagrees. The big man, the guide,
is almost lost in the swiveling snow,
his big feet stepping wide.

The mourners are out there, waiting,
crouching in the grey grass, and the wind
moves, its single note plaining and sacred
across this strange sky. Their eyes
are darkened and their faces blurred,
touched by the fallen noon. They become
tongueless children, hunched like hawks.

Now the cortège reaches the private club,
The Necropole, its iron gates
propped wide with powdery drifts.
And it is the mother-in-law that must
be carried to the open grave, drooping
like a string bag between the big guide
and her husband, whose pants
indeed are stained. The burial pit
is in a walled courtyard, with angels fat
as snowmen. But she will not lie down.
Not yet. First there is lunch to eat.

Slowly now, rising, a girl is fingering
the black ribbon at her throat, her white
shirt opening. A young man falls towards her,
mouthing blood. This is the silent always:
the amber tide rising heavy around our
frail house. A grey leaf shifts on the porch,
and we are deafened by the sudden sigh of grasses.