Marita O’Neill At the Funeral

At the Funeral

Those were his best years, someone tells me, the years with you. While your uncle from Chicago looks through

our wedding album, as he makes his way through ham sandwiches and seltzer in a paper cup. Another man, a college

friend of your brother’s, whose name I can’t hear in the din, tells me about the night, so funny, when your brother locked you

in his dorm room, screaming from a bad trip on mushrooms. As he talks, I calculate you were 15, maybe 16. Or the time,

he says, when you got so wasted on vodka and grape juice, you spent the next day puking. As my stomach turns from too many coffees

and he was so funny’s and that fifth-time hearing from another Row Camp friend from upstate New York, how we called him Bam-Bam,

how he wore nothing but a tie-died diaper to a party, holding a stick, blonde curls dangling, hence the knick-name. And the kindnesses: the cousin

who pulls me aside to say, It wasn’t your fault, you know that, right? And the father-in-law in AA who told you: you’re playing with fire. How he talked

through your boyish grin, your I got this head nod. When I was little, sitting in Catholic mass, we heard the story of Lazarus, how Jesus brought him

forth, all body stench and rags, from three days’ dead. No one could believe it—maybe not even Jesus. This miracle, emerging out from

the void. As a kid, I believed this dead man coming forth, the power of love to pull each other out from grave, from dead chill and fire.

Your mother told me the story: how she cried and cried, lying on the living room floor, after putting you all to bed—three boys aged three

to six—after she heard, late one late night, calling your father’s apartment, his female student’s voice answering the phone. As the pictures rolled,

I caught a photo of our wedding day, we’re hand in hand, your red bow tie beaming, my veil waving. Those were the days when I believed

I could call you forth, days when I thought you’d hear my voice, hear my, please, love, and follow me out. Late for work and panicked, I once

pressed a wine bottle in your arms, told you, Here, cuddle up with this. Is this what you want? I didn’t mean it as a curse, yet now as the picture fades,

I notice how we’re waving out to friends, both of us younger, smiling, and I’m turning away––too soon––while you slip away out of frame.

Marita O’Neill

Marita O'Neill lives in Portland, Maine, where she teaches high school English. She received her MFA in poetry from Vermont College of the Arts and has one published chapbook, Evidence of Light. Other publications include the Portland Press Herald's Deep Water Poetry Series, the Cafe Review, and the Union of Maine Visual Arts Magazine.