☀ What Sparks Poetry: J. Michael Martinez on "The Wake of Maria de Jesus Martinez"

Disbudded chrysanthemum
                florets ring her casket:

                                oak laid,
                                my grandmother’s arms

                cross; gilded gold,
                her bold button’d suit

                lays black against white satin;
                oak grieved, her daughter kneels

                tear-pearled & sorrow sung:

                tear-pearled & sorrow sung:

                the furnaces hunger

                                within my mother’s cry,

                                love mother’d what love must hate—

                                the gasping erasure

                                be        her        fore her

                                cut be/fore away:

                                be/fore away:
                                Maria Jesus

                                grin sly beneath her
                                waist-long silver
                                hair, cigarette thin

                                in her slender
                                hand, she glances

                                outside the frame
                                into image’s inevitable

                                collapse; or, with what paper-soft

                collapse; or, with what paper-soft

                                                        steeple’d hands,
she leads

me to dream in
fatherlessness:

some men wear
every organ a throne:

                                I wear my grandmother’s hearse,

                                                            a shell gasping black
burdened by body.

                                                            I mean to say I am
                                                            hiding, I mean I am holding

                                her rosary: as pale oval as

her rosary:                as pale oval as

                                                                peppermint candies

                                                                half-sucked
                                                                        &
                                                                sugar sweet

                                                                bone-blanched,
                                                                slick with

                                                                the extended definition
                                                                of some distant

                                steeple’d faith:
                                                                as pale oval as

                                steeple’d faith:
                                                                    as pale oval as

                                                                    death
                                                                    bound her hands
                                                                    a rose-nest
                                                                    of mood & form
                                                                    unbridled

                                                                    from within.

                                                                    unbridled

                                                                    from within.

                                                    a ceaseless cancer
                                                    ate her silence

                                                                    &, now,

                                                    four mourner rows stand
                                                    before my fugitive eyes:

                                                                    &

                                                                    I agree
                                                                    to conduct

                                                        I agree
                                                        to conduct

                                                          her a dollhouse

                                                          sermon of plastic-pink
                                                          comfort flowers.

                                                        Comfort flowers
                                                                   a sermon of
plastic comfort pinking.

                                        & I said,

                                                        Death matron’d my mother

                                                                    of her mother matron:

                                                                    a three year
                                                                    slice of

                                                                    night falling
                                                                    & what patient

                                                                    blackrot shook
                                                                    her lung black.

                                       Her lung black,

                                                                        I said, I know why the lamb white
                                                                        wooed the lion:

                                                                        to uplift the last
                                                                        of all letters,

                                                                        all the ardor pure.
                                                                        God-make,

                                                                        make god my
                                                                        unconscious soon born

                                                                        sober sunburn.
                                                                        Soon, you cry, I

                                                                        too soon cry,
                                                                        soon—to—soon

                                                                        each other’s soon, sung
                                                                        for each’s soon.

                                       For each’s soon, I said,
                                                        my mother knelt
                                                                        & cried, I said,

                                                        There is only the fall:
                                                                        like leaves grasping,
                                                                        we are each’s first sketch.

                                                        The shoots bud upon the branch
                                                                        & I say, I think we are loved.

                                                                        & I know we are loved.

                                                        For each’s soon, I said,
                                                        You held for each’s soon.