The worker handed us a clay pot 
too small to contain a man,
even one transformed into ash.

We carried the pot to the sea.
When his brother poured it over the swirling water
some fragments of charred bone
washed quickly away.

Now the man is contained 
not just in a body, 
a pot, 
ash, a bone
or, for a while, in our fragments of memory,
but at last, in a space vast enough for all his desires:

the whole earth, the weeping clouds, the sky, 
the glittering firmament.