You wore the black wool coat that smells like the closet, and you stood very still in the row of chairs, and all day you kept the good hand pressed flat against your leg so no one would see it shaking. I saw. That is what I am made of, the parts of the day you held still.
Tonight I will let the shaking loose. The folding chairs will become a rowboat, and you will paddle it down the church aisle, which by then will be the creek behind the house you grew up in. Your grandmother will be there, not sick, not old, just there, shelling peas into a bowl that never fills, and you will not find this strange.
You will ask her the question you did not get to ask, and she will answer in the voice of the radio, and you will believe her.
The lilies, that smell that filled the whole room, I will keep. But I will make them grow through the floorboards, up your sleeves, out the windows, until the whole building is a garden and the organ is a kind of bee. Nobody will be wearing black. You will forget you own a black coat.
The word you could not say at the front of the room, the one that folded up in your throat like a note passed and never opened, I will hand it back to you unfolded. You will read it aloud to the peas and the water and the heron who is somehow also your uncle, and it will be enough. It will finally be enough.
Then the light will come up gray behind the blinds, and I will thin out like breath on glass, taking the creek and the lilies and the answered question with me. You will keep only a wet feeling in the chest and no reason for it. That is all right.
I did the crying you were too polite to do.