by Hilde Weisert

 

Why doesn’t everyone think of this? His daughter

is a minister herself, perhaps that gives her license;

perhaps it’s the art he loved, or just the indelible

 

imprint of a person on the people who love him.

Perhaps it’s love. At first, we are taken aback,

seeing what she’s laid out – not a body, out here in the park,

 

and not the standard photographs or video montage,

but his actual clothes – the giant jacket hung

from a branch on a tree, and on the ground

 

his shoes, huge now without the tall man to stand

in them. Ellie stands on the grassy rise, and instead of

talking about him, remembering this and that,

 

she gives us Dan’s arms, hands splayed out

in his wide gesture of amazement, voice lifting

from a charged hush to an onrush of words

 

for the latest earth-shaking idea, invention – his, yours,

some genius across the world. Isn’t there a rule

that says you don’t mimic the dead? Don’t bring

 

a dead man’s shoes to his funeral? But a daughter

can make her own rules. Ellie is all he used to

bend our ear about, and this is the best

 

funeral ever. We don’t learn anything, we just see

what we didn’t even know we’d noticed.

For an hour, we grow big, amazed; like Dan.