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SEA BURIAL
Poetry
by C. Marcus Parr
I
Remembering:
We drove south, with her
In a cardboard box,
From the coroner to the sea.
When I was young I took the train
To Monte Rio.
Hired a cabin by the river.
Oh, how it rained that Summer.
In her plastic-lined resting place the
Ashes contained
A passenger beside us, strapped—
Ignominious, mute: Mother.
All she had been,
All she had become
Among the boys who courted me
I favored your father.
In his khaki slacks and bourbon.
We shared the same ambition.
In a cardboard box.
II
We fed her to the empty sea
Between the lacquered rock and insouciant sky
And bloodless sun.
We sang to the eulogy of waves,
To the fecundity of life,
To an Otherworld of fish feeding off the dead.
We came here when
We both were young. With her, my sister said.
We worked her grave with our hands
Until the box was empty,
And the sea full of Mother.
III
O, unmarked cemetery,
Consummate tomb of the sea.
Accept our weeping,
Promise her memorial on every shore,
Where ageless ocean washes rock,
Our lives, one pulse in the endless rush;
No winnowed life nor stone abides the savagery
of time—
Footprints laid behind us that the cascade sweeps away.
Her daughter saw me baptized
By her dust, by my alluvial life;
survivor of a shipwreck;
Guest at this supper of the fish,
Come to bid good-bye.
§ § §
C. Marcus Parr’s short fiction, poems, and cartoons have appeared in literary magazines and independent press in the United States and Canada. He received the Nancy Pickard Fiction Award, 1992, and was runner-up for the Pearl Fiction Award, 1996. His short story “The Devil Visits Confidence” was serialized and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His poems “Oppenheimer’s Laugh” and “A Thousand Endless Words” were also nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Having earned a degree in the Humanities from the University of California at Berkeley, Parr lives and writes on a small working farm near Portland, Oregon, with his wife Leslie Ann Cheney-Parr, watercolor artist and college instructor. Marcus teaches community education classes in short fiction.
These pieces were first published in INK
POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.
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