The burial of the dead

Shortly after its birth, the universe, cosmologists tell us,
must have undergone a symmetry-breaking event, otherwise
matter would have been annihilated by the equally abundant antimatter,
and not much would have come out of the big bang except perhaps
a smaller bang.

Shortly after his death, the body of my father looked smaller, 
his big head, under the shroud, turned one way, his knees another,
the body's broken symmetry a silent echo of the universe becoming emptier by half,
revealing a reflection of myself, decades older, in a dark mirror facing
backwards in time.

Which is more fearful, the perfect countenance of a live tiger,
rising to meet you from the tall, rustling grass,
or the memory of a dead one, a heap of bones in a sack of hide, 
a sad victory of hunter over beast, or maybe merely of entropy,
symmetry's bane?

Stark lessons in broken symmetry and universe transformed
accompany the Hebrew law that governs birth, life, death -
and burial, skin next to burning Sinai sand, the law
delivered by Moses to his reluctant people, waiting to return 
to the land of Osiris,

where the earth-bound bodies of the grateful dead
were shaped before burial into images of accomplished symmetry,
and their liberated hearts, light as the feather of Maat,
gently brought Thoth's hesitant scale
to a balance.

Gentile or Jew - if you are not spared by the undertaker's casket
the fearful last glimpse of your friend's empty, twisted husk, robbed
of its power to make or break its own symmetry at will - 
console yourself: most shall learn of such things only 
from hearsay, or from reading 

these lines. 

                                February 2004

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