MARJORIE MADDOX

Appropriate

My friend Lucille wears only black and gives away
a shirt, a sweater, a short stretch skirt each time she buys
another piece of fabric. Her etiquette
of funeral apparel: “Wear according to your consciousness
of grief,” and so I dress my six-month daughter
in pink to match the absence of loss
she feels at her first funeral: a woman we did not know
who had my name, and died the way my father did,
hoping for a heart to make him whole.

The husband, who forgets my name,
says my daughter will break hearts
as she coos and drools on my black dress
that clothes me in tradition if not grief.
Some here wear gray stretch pants,
some white high heels after Labor Day.
I look to see where grief is draped;
my daughter starts to cry. In these stiff pews,
I sway to calm her.

In his gold cope, the priest is speaking
of his baby, who shares the deceased’s name
with me. His eldest daughter, Lucy,
lights the candles white and smiles at my child.
I hold my small one tighter at the prayers
and think I hear my father’s hopeful voice.

But it is still the priest, reciting
Hopkin’s poem to Margaret.
His clean, bald head shines babylike in candlelight
the way, ten years ago, it must have caught the shadows
of cigarettes in New York coffee houses
as he read poems to cope
with what he saw each city day.

It is clean and rural here. My friend,
now far away in Boston wearing black,
grieves her life. She wants a child and home.
My daughter shares her middle name,
her thick, rich hair that curls above a face
that has my father’s color.
With dry eyes, we travel home and change our clothes,
something appropriate to the weather.