Because I have asked him, I am
In the gravedigger’s truck waiting
For a funeral to finish. 
To show respect, I am wearing
My best topcoat to cover jeans. 
There is a distance named discrete,
And he maintains it for his job.  
He never plays the radio.

The gravedigger says there are times
He shovels by hand for infants 
And the cremated, holes too small 
For the spade of machinery.  
For those, weather is important, 
The earth, if frozen, is a bitch.

Below zero, it was, the day
My mother was buried, backhoe
Visible on a nearby rise,
Mound of earth covered by something 
Designed to look like summer sod.
The pastor worked January
Into meaning, snow and zero
Entwined like the benevolent 
Grasp of God until we performed 
The chilled amen of erasure.

My sister, four hours from here, 
Stores mementoes of our parents--
A pressed dark suit, a Sunday dress.
Alone in her house, I’ve opened 
Her bedroom closet like a thief.
Just what does she anticipate? 
To dress them for judgment the way 
She prepared them for burial? 
I have alibis for missing
Tenderness. Yes, I was elsewhere. 

Once, I say, I watched as an urn
Was laid into a grave behind 
A local church. The woman’s one 
Surviving son shoveled soil 
While the minister recited 
A prayer we could follow along
The page of a printed program.

The gravedigger watches the crowd
For the retreat to cars.  He talks
Over the premonition that
Insists like a tinnitus shriek.
A child must be more difficult
Than a baby, I try, and he
Says he’s opened and closed the earth 
For his father; now his mother 
Has entered hospice. I cannot 
Fill in the silence.  Whatever
You can bear, he says, and we do.