Jason Labbe

Viking Funeral For Jackie

I don’t have your best interest anywhere

near the still sunken portion of my chest.

Unless ruined, and so overrated, you fester.

If it’s not impossible you’re uninterested.

What vestige of our resting will be

sequestered, in which world will the restless

never have to face you, nevertheless

recognize the only way one can walk away.

Every breath is our last, every lament.

            *

The future most unlikely is the one most

imagined—nobody here but us, crystalline,

a constellation. The pines around the lake

soft and black, night sky, the scrape

of the ropes tightening after I lay your body

on the pyre. And mine over yours.

Slowly the fire catches at our feet.

The lake is almost an oval and has one

visible side—no moon shines inside the water

warming, teeming, unrippling. But there

is light. What unseen other shoves us off,

what void fails to be our final thought.

Jason Labbe is the author of two chapbooks, Blackwash Canal (H_NGM_N BKS) and Dear Photographer (Phylum Press), as well as poems in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Poetry, and Ephemeroptera. He lives in Bethany, Connecticut and curates readings for Intercambio (http://weareintercambio.org/)  in New Haven.