Die Ford Die

and take it with you, the whole parenthesis
of it, opening upwards, smile-like, slime-like,
to the world, containing everything and everything
that comes just after it. You will take my election signs
and the snow that's covered them just after your passing
through this world and into another, after one of many passing
plays broadcast on ESPN classic, you in maze,
in maize and blue. And as you go into it, the cool
blackafter, all afterburners and more than occasional
vitriol, take the clot of mourning with—
haul it all away, Xmas trees in the weeks
after the holiday, still clotted with lights. You were a light
of sorts, and sixty thousand in Grand Rapids
pressed their bodies together in a hundred plus lines
weaving back and forth in a warehouse, spilling like light
from lampposts weaving in the snowy haze
out into the street and freezing. We gathered
here, hearing aids and walking aids, and special
teacher's aides and all other kinds of aids, just
to watch the funeral procession crawl up I-196,
least venerated of Interstates, towards one of the outposts
on the trail to your final rest. Your name was
vapor trail on all our lips, even mine, these slipping things
that never had much to say for you, and if you were
a President, I barely knew it; you were past tense for me,
a memory of pardon, airport, and one
of this city's few claims on sweet hereafter.
But I stood there too in the wind and cold,
above the winding road, not above exactly,
as no one stood above your procession as it passed,
leaving the overpasses only half-filled out of ceremony,
but we were there. If you were there, then you can say
you were, and there we were together, hands clammed
together, humming, almost, with something like the galaxy
of excitement we reserve for celebrity approach.

There were some flags. And I can say, here
if not elsewhere, that I felt something,
strange as that may be, for you or your idea,
not you in fiction, devoured by wolves, as if
you could be anything other than fiction and if
we could know the body as we do the story, and
I was cold and I was there and there
we were together, triangulated, you and I
and more than sixty thousand who had a kind
of rabid love for you, their kin, their kine, and there
were almost contrails in the sky from fighter jets
who had come through hours ago in a dry run for their
maneuvers during the last of your many funerals,
and I wish they came together better, spelled something
out in the chemical remains of fire and refracted light,
but I could barely see them, and then I could barely see,
and there is very little left to say.