By ALLISON FUNK
in County Meath, Ireland
You must leave everything you’ve carried
to enter the tomb, says the guide
pointing to the passage grave
mounded with earth. From outside,
the tumulus all but obscures
death’s reach,
also its fruitfulness, which has already
filled my husband
with the sweet mystery
that suffused Eurydice. And me—
why would I want to hurry
back to the crawlspace
my life has become? I’ve stood
at this threshold in my mind before,
imagining, like Rilke,
less loss than release,
a loosening: long hair poured out
like fallen rain. Even so,
on the shortest day of the year,
with winter howling inside me,
I find myself dazzled
by a shaft of sun on the innermost
wall of the cairn. Here,
gone, fast as a firefly.
Light and its innuendos
hinting there’s more
for me to see.
Allison Funk is the author of six books of poems, including The Visible Woman. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Scientific American, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.
