Why attend your ex-wife’s funeral
when the in-laws will only glare at you
as if you’d killed her instead of the Winstons?
I quit smoking about the time the fire
died in the marriage,
so I’m still here after all these years
alone in the last pew eyeing the emergency exit
and looking at once in and out of place
like a surveyor’s tripod in the road.
When the saccharine music stops,
my son, our son, from the pulpit speaks
of a woman I was married to for ten years,
and despised for nine, a woman who,
I hear him say, applied the Ace bandage,
tossed the spaghetti, helped him solve for X,
and cheered as he rounded third.
“We were alone in those days,” he says
with a quick glance toward his daughter.
Over her shoulder, my ex’s sister
silently strafes me with scorn.
Well, what did I do for him but write the monthly check,
show him the director’s cut of The Wild Bunch,
and how to open a bottle of wine?
I only go to church for funerals and weddings
and leave both before Pachelbel’s Canon,
but today I linger as her family and friends file by
casting down their eyes on me,
the slayer, my offering, in lieu of flowers.
Click here to read Harry Gordon on the origin of the poem.
Image by Mayron Oliveira on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Harry Gordon:
My poems tend to expand from a specific event, moment, or image that becomes embedded in my mind and then over time worries itself into something more, like a grain of sand in an oyster, not to suggest that the results are pearls.
“In lieu of flowers” has always seemed a haunted expression to me as so much is left out yet implied, and it is most often associated with death, the great absence. You’ll never see it used at a wedding. I know florists hate the expression as it is bad for business.
The obvious irony in the poem is, I suppose, that the somewhat jaded narrator realizes that the woman he despised did more for their son than he ever did, and he feels as though he owes her something, but he owes his son even more. When his son glances toward his daughter and says, “We were alone in those days,” the narrator knows that his son will never distance himself from his child as he did. So, the narrator doesn’t leave this time, deciding rather to suffer a kind of reverse gantlet of scorn — his shot at redemption and, perhaps, an offering to his son, in lieu of flowers.
Harry Gordon is a U.S. Army veteran and former teacher and newspaper reporter living in Long Beach, CA. After earning degrees in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara (BA) and Cal State University, Fullerton (MA), he taught English, and occasionally journalism and film, for 33 years in the Huntington Beach High School District in Southern California. His articles, poetry, and stories have appeared in various publications including The Los Angeles Times, Travel Holiday, Sail Magazine, and The South Carolina Review.
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