Funeral Procession

André Czerny

cyanotype photographic print

Hungary, 1956

The clouds look diffused, the sun distant, a faraway lantern held by a traveler descending a mountain. You’re only waiting for a storm to pass. That’s what the journey’s for, isn’t it?

There’s a hatch in the earth, so you open it.

You said what you had to say, and here I am still talking, still looking for an appropriate tragedy, a pine coffin lined with nutgrass and linen, an odor of sunflowers and dill.

Light has arrived, but morning still waits for its reason. The skin is such flexible clothing but so easily soiled and torn.

Can you really wear what belongs to another?

If you can still see him the way he was, it’s about you, and if you can’t, it’s about you. If I have something simple to say I sing for a long time, if it’s complicated, I shut up before I have to lie.

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Rich Ives has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Thin Air Creative Nonfiction Award. His books include Light from a Small Brown Bird (Bitter Oleander Press--poetry), Sharpen (The Newer York—fiction chapbook), The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books—stories), Old Man Walking Home After Dark (Cyberwit--poetry), Dubious Inquiries into Magnificent Inadequacies (Cyberwit--poetry), A Servant’s Map of the Body (Cyberwit—stories), Incomprehensibly Well-adjusted Missing Persons of Interest (Cyberwit—stories), and Tunneling to the Moon (Silenced Press--stories).