I didn’t know Snyder did this for his beloved too 
and wrote about it after, and that is daunting 
and dear reader I love the genius of how he said, 
you don’t want to read this, because I know it too 
but I must write it, though I fear I’m not up to this 

telling of my beloved’s cremation story, and no you really 
won’t want to read it because we all know it’s hard 
and harsh and surreally cold and like Waiting for Godot 
without the cleverness, just the rawness of a cold body 
in a cardboard box in a weird echoey crematorium 

in a five-story stark warehouse with an unfinished 
interior, the white paint only covering one story like 
around the oven and the crematorium refrigerator door 
and the white frames and white blinds of the windows 
of the witnessing area like a little terrarium opposite 

that big oven for cooking humans with its chromed 
non-skid steel plates like the back end of a fire engine, 
I mean the viewing room really is like a living room 
in the rotating part of the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey 
but I say no, I don’t, we don’t, want to sit in the terrarium, 

no, I want my witness and me to sit beside the body, I want 
to touch the body I want to kiss the body I want to cry on it 
to put two red roses on it and read poems aloud to it and 
play music from our wedding on my Bluetooth speaker 
and though their eyes get wide, they do it, they bring 

these plush forest-green silk-embroidered chairs out 
onto the vast concrete slab of the crematorium floor and 
set them beside the industrial strength scissor-base table 
that is so much more than is needed for my wife who looks 
like Dachau to a camera but my beloved to me, especially 

under the blanket where I discover deep purple skin as I 
reach beneath to touch the still place where her heartbeat 
was, because the undertaker only applied makeup down to 
her collarbones, before we sit with our poems and photos, 
after I place speaker under transport table, and lean over 

to kiss my wife’s cold glued-together lips as I slip two fresh 
red roses between her fingers and hands on her chest and 
leave a wet tear from my right eye on her right cheek, before 
I sit down and listen to my witness friend read excerpts from 
Whittier’s Snowbound, queue up Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s 

from the beginning ... you know it’s all clear, we were meant to 
be here and I push the Play button when he stops reading—
and incredibly the polished concrete slab of the floor and 
the unpainted high sheetrock walls magnify the music as if we’re 
inside a great bell, same as when the song filled the church that 

day we wed, and it’s all clear these are two halves of one moment, 
our eternal moment, that she always called a divine appointment, 
as engraved inside our wedding rings, and now it’s time to read 
Whyte’s The Truelove like I did in our wedding, as we always knew 
yes there was only one hand beckoning each of us, yours for me 

and mine for you, as the oven beckons now your refrigerated flesh, 
as my old friend cries gently, silently as I lean once more to kiss 
goodbye your icy forehead above your frozen mouth and yes even 
that I kiss farewell, linger as McCartney’s Blackbird starts to play 
on the Bluetooth and abruptly, I am back, standing over a corpse 

in a crematorium like a warehouse, and the second hand of my 
wristwatch moves like whatever is clicking in the song, and 
the song is coming to its end, and our time to be here is almost 
done, as the attendants enter the room, wet-eyed and heads 
bowed to the side, yes it’s time to say yes, to this yes, yes 

time to pick up the speaker, close photographs inside our books, 
walk behind the men pushing the body to the black cave of the oven 
that seems like the back end of a too-late ambulance, rollers 
turning, rumbling under the weight of the body vanishing even 
before doors thump shut, before I am shown the flame button 

to click and my hand rests on the control mouse, and I remember 
to say, Beloved Shaun, I commit what will burn to the sky, 
as I will commit your ashes to those places we have both loved 
here in the world that beckoned each of us, separate, then bound 
together on this plane, now unbound again, for a time, for a time 

—In memory of Shaun Thomas (24 February 1956 – 5 November 2024):
Our love is transformed, not gone.

—This poem follows “Sitting with Her Body” (January 2025), and
“A Kind of Prayer for My Bedridden Wife” (September 2024).

Thomas A. Thomas

was born in Illinois to a medical-doctor mother and a ballet-dancer father, and spent a lot of time off by himself in the woods, prairies, and fields, day and night, in all seasons. Thomas found his way to the University of Michigan (U.M.), where he studied with Donald Hall, and Gregory Orr, and workshopped some poems with Robert Bly. He won Minor and Major Hopwood Awards in Poetry, and his poem “Approaching Here” was choreographed and performed at U.M.

Thomas worked as Detroit Correspondent for a St. Louis-based Rock and Jazz magazine, Concert News, covering many of the major acts of the mid-1970s. After a couple of years of madness in New York City in the late Seventies, he camped his way west to Washington state, where he has happily made his home for more than 40 years. He now serves as a Board Member for the Olympia Poetry Network, and is active in numerous online poetry and photography groups.

His poems, photographs, and video recordings appear in print and online, most recently in The Banyan Review, Blue Heron Review, Cirque Journal, FemAsia Magazine, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and Vox Populi, as well as in English-language anthologies and in translation to Spanish, Serbian, and Bengali. His work was nominated for Best of the Net in 2022 and for the Pushcart Prize in 2022 and 2024.

Thomas is the author of two books. The first is a collection of poems and photography, Getting Here (Trafford Publishing, 2005). The second is a memoir in poems, My Heart Is Not Asleep, among Kirkus Reviews’ six Best Indie Books of November, that “delicately reconstruct moments”* from a decade of caring for his late wife, as she gradually succumbed to early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Poet’s website: https://thomas-a-thomas.com

MoonPath Press (June, 2024)

*From Dzvinia Orlowsky’s blurb for the book.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ On Being Astonished and Capturing the Sight in a Poem, an interview of Thomas A. Thomas by Karen Hugg (8 May 2019).

(Hugg, pronounced “hewg,” is a professional horticulturist and writer of literary mysteries and nonfiction articles about plants. Her most recent book, published in 2022, is Leaf Your Troubles Behind: How to Destress and Grow Happiness Through Plants.)