by Diane Funston
The Egyptians placed organs in Canopic jars
before the mummification of kings.
Heart, liver, brain, those tangled parts
that make up physical life
sealed in urns with carved heads
of jackal, falcon, cat and cobra.
I place signs of past life in one wooden box.
Poetry events, photographs, treasures
we discovered over two decades.
Times when we were younger, busier,
when I was lonely for adult voices
who, I believed, could carry the same joyful song.
The melody became a dirge from your end.
Sealed inside the box you isolated, as was your choice.
My vision of our union, cremated.
I traveled to mountains, to desert and back,
explored other continents and cultures,
across the country and home again.
You remained in the box, barely rattling.
It grew comfortable in your myopic view.
I listened for discomfort from your chains
but heard instead vivid description of your four walls,
the stunted view out the seams of a pale horse coming.
You never asked how I was doing with my wings
crudely but temporarily clipped from old ghosts of melancholy.
After all, I flew over an ocean to dry your tears.
listened to stories I already knew by heart.
I was the first person you saw after surgical sleep.
You crawled back in the box dazed with recovery.
Now I shut the box and tuck it behind
clothes that no longer fit, with old music of protest.
I take it out on occasion to remind me
how loss smells so similar
to stale mothballs.
Diane Funston has been published in journals including California Quarterly, Synkronicity, San Diego Poetry Annual, F(r)iction, Tule Review, and Lake Affect Magazine among others.
She lives in the agricultural Sacramento Valley of California with her husband and two dogs.
Diane’s chapbook, her first, entitled Over The Falls from Foothills Publishing, was born in 2022.