XXXIX

 

A squelch and slub of shovel-blade.
All day rain-bloated ditches made
digging difficult, floating spades,

 

foamed up flecks of rotted pine;
his sogged gravesite gushed a slime
of silt and peat and spill. In time

 

rain gattles all tombs: this grave,
bundled in tarps, gave and gave,
a gash you floundered in to stave

 

off flooding. Then a blade slit wood.
Clumped half-sunk in a soft hood
of coffin. Sifted its stew of mud,

 

flayed worms, seed-hard kerns of teeth.
All bilge and reek of meat and death.
Foul seepage. Like a long-held breath,

 

this, the harrowing of your father's
ribs and hair, a kind of brittle prayer
made bone of. To dig from there

 

those strags of him not led to God
and bury all back in holier ground —
a mud dense and thick as blood

 

in the murky rain. Mired in that pit
the hired man tightened, held his lips,
fumbled deep a dreeped casket grip

 

and groped beneath. You threaded him
a rope, winched it firm, that coffin
slucking noisily clear. Reeling in

 

and of a piece. Faith too is like that,
he'd believed: a thing hauled hard, set
to rights, a steady raising of the dead.

 

From Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price. Copyright © 2006 by Steven Price. Reprinted by permission of Steven Price and Brick Books.