A death rattle, a flock of pigeons falling silent, and then, impossibly, the dead person keeps talking. Dave Bonta's "Last rites" is eight short lines, yet it covers the whole journey from last breath to afterlife in memory. Its central idea is that death is not simply an ending but a transformation. The speaker stops being a body and becomes a story, and the thing that survives is not grief but joy.
The title promises solemnity. Last rites are the sacrament given to the dying, and the poem borrows that hush at once. "my breath rattled" is blunt and physical. The word *rattled* sounds like what it describes, with its dry, clicking consonants. Then comes the strange, lovely detail that "the pigeons went quiet." Pigeons are ordinary, even faintly comic birds, not the swans or nightingales of grander elegies. Their silence works like a congregation falling still. The world notices this death, but modestly, through the smallest witnesses.
The second couplet changes tense and tone: "doors come to be great friends / with the dead." The past tense of the opening has become a general present, almost a proverb. Doors are thresholds, and the dead are the ones who pass through them, carried out of rooms, houses and finally life. Calling doors "great friends" is playful and slightly eerie. It suggests a gradual intimacy (*come to be*), as though the dead and the doors share a secret about leaving. It also hints that the living house goes on without the dead person, its doors opening and closing for others.
The third couplet is the most daring: "I eat my afterself / and depart into story." *Afterself* is not an everyday word, and it seems to be the poet's own coinage. It names the version of you that exists once you are gone, the one made of other people's memories and anecdotes. Eating it echoes communion, the bread taken in the very rite the title names, but here the sacrament is turned inward. The speaker consumes his own posthumous identity, accepting it and making it part of himself before he leaves. The verb *depart* is gentle and old-fashioned, the language of train stations and obituaries, and what he departs *into* is not heaven or nothingness but narrative. For a poet, that may be the most believable afterlife on offer.
The final couplet brings in the bureaucracy of death: "the coroner will be called / to examine my joy." A coroner investigates cause of death, so we expect a body, a cause, a report. Instead the object of examination is *joy*. The line is funny and moving at once. It implies that if anything killed the speaker, it was gladness, or that joy is the one thing officialdom cannot explain. The future tense matters too. After the past of the rattle and the present of the proverb, the poem ends looking forward, as if the speaker, already inside the story, is watching what happens next. Time bends the way it does in a tale.
Formally, the poem is spare. There are four unrhymed couplets, no capital letters and no full stops, so the poem never quite closes its own door. The lines are short, mostly two or three strong beats, which leaves silence around each phrase, much like the pigeons' quiet. Sound ties the lines together without rhyme: the repeated *d* of "doors" and "dead," the *c* of "coroner" and "called," and the soft echo of *self* and *story*. The last word, *joy*, is a single stressed syllable, and it stays in the air.
What makes the poem significant is how it refuses the usual elegiac script. It does not weep or bargain. It folds ritual, law and storytelling into a few lines and lets the dry vocabulary of the coroner's office meet something unmeasurable. Its small, strange images (a rattle, birds gone silent, friendly doors) persuade us that facing death can include humor and appetite, and that a person's last act may be to turn into something that can be told.