They are warming up to play at his uncle’s funeral procession. Uncle Vos was his mother’s brother; a big man, mustachioed and smelt of garlic and often of tequila too. He did not live with them, but visited three or four times a year for a week or so. There were picnics and presents; he stayed in his parents room, they retired to a cot in the kitchen.

Twenty families would come to the evening barbecues, and uncle Vos would drink many beers, wear his sombrero and sing ancient songs with his loud basso cantante. The rest of the year he spent in Juarez, “Making his money,” he said. And then one day he was shot and killed. The police said it would be better if he were not buried in Juarez, but in his sister’s town Chapalilla, under the volcano.

I don’t know, I understand so little, I can hardly see,
but I believe that death’s song is the color of wet violets,
violets accustomed to the earth,
because the face of death is green, and the gaze of death is green
with the sharp wetness of the leaf of a violet
and its serious color of wintery impatience. Pablo Neruda

George's selection of 66 Phlogs is available in print from People's Press.

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