In the cafeteria
you stood behind me in line,
your face dressed in impeccable white,
your mouth practicing words
for a world you did not know,
your ears regarding a private thunder,
your nose sucking nonsense,
your eyes absent,
policing for mutinous tissue.
Excusing yourself,
you said, “Save my place,”
and were gone.
Disconnected,
your mind swelled with truth
and you died
in a world before spring.
We buried you with dignity
in our thin ceremony,
an exhausted seed
in an exhausted soil.
Wearing our timid expectations
dully like mourning clothes,
we walked from your grave,
stunned by the difference you made
and fighting forgetfulness.
1970
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In the spring of 1964 when I was a college junior, a classmate died quite unexpectedly. The supper before we talked in the cafeteria line. She seemed distracted and absent, like something I could not know was overwhelming her attention. Suddenly she excused herself and left the line. Her last words to me; “Save my place.”
The next day word came she was dead. I was shocked, just having been with the living Helen. It was my first experience of someone my age dying. A line of sober-faced students snaked through the funeral home to say farewell and offer condolences to her grieving parents. The funeral was a verbal affair, all spoken words with no ritual, as if words were enough to signify that someone had disappeared beyond the mystery of life into death. The burial was also devoid of ceremony, no gestures, no smoke, no bells, no chant. We left the graveside before the casket was lowered and the dirt replaced.
For six years the memory of those funereal days lingered resulting in the poem. A cataclysmic event had occurred. Helen had died, and we in our literal world could only muster up words to mark her death. Fifty one years later I still hold a place for this brief life using words.