An urn is a curious thing.
Its decorative embrace of emptiness
longing to be filled with something
calls to us for attentive display.
The beauty of urns makes us uneasy.
Why are they here, lurking about,
stalking us with abject impracticality?
Keats had his wistful Grecian urn
but, ever pragmatic,
we Americans have few urns
except those with ashes
we don’t know what to do with.
We can place them on the mantle
underneath Grandma’s portrait,
at risk of ending up in a Browning poem:
“There’s my last Grandma
hanging about the shelf.”
Or like a Wallace Stevens jar in Tennessee,
we can place it on a table in the center of a room
the deceased built and loved to inhabit—
and may still be filling
the space’s nooks and crannies
like so much slovenly wilderness dust.
One such urn ended up
in random places around the house:
“One Christmas Dad hung out with Baby Jesus
in the manger,” a sister bemused,
as though she had no idea
how the ashes got there.
Maybe urns circumlocate
like the shekinah glory of God,
gracing our emptiness
with grief’s unsettling beauty.
Or perhaps urns move us with them,
reminding us of what makes us sad
after losing someone we love—
the emptiness of recalling good memories
and realizing that we didn’t recognize,
appreciate, or acknowledge that beauty
at the time. So we missed it.
We long for the opportunity to say,
“I’m sorry. I forgive you.
Thank you. I love you.”
for all those moments we couldn’t classify
as unequivocally good at the time
because we would have only pure goodness,
as the artists of the ideal that we are—
not some admixture of clay and paint
too easily cracked and broken.
No wonder we keep moving this grief around,
scattering the ubiquitous dust
that gathers round it.
We don’t know what to do otherwise
until the circumnavigational Shekinah
manifests in, out, and through grief’s emptiness,
turning it all inside out,
and declaring that the only way to make amends
for what remains irrevocably broken
from the past is to open ourselves
to the goodness that is happening all around
so that we can see and say
what needs to be said to the living now
as we embrace beauty’s emptiness
and let the ashes fly.
