Funeral Pie

Stuart Friebert

Winner of The Four Way Books Award Series in Poetry
selected by Heather McHugh

THE REQUIEM SHARK

—For A

Said to exist chiefly
in tropical waters, where,
contrary to belief, depths
can be gloomy, full of
unnerving sadness, as if
a geological error and
diving down Neitzsche comes
to mind: not how one soul
comes closer to another,
but how it moves away,
tells about kinship.

We merely expect
a wallowing pleasure
when it turns a cold shoulder,
on the born side of creation,
as beside it human swimmers
do not seem to have matured:

it is the most alarming
of our qualities, while
the shark’s bloodless gaze
calls forth piety, then nausea.