Funeral Home
There are no groves here
sheltering a golden bough
along this Old Post Road.
Cater-cornered across the way
graves of Revolution soldiers
are marked by smooth slate.
You were carried deep inside
like a struggling Persephone
into a masonry underground.
Was that your original name
or the one you remembered,
fractured, trailing off, stopped?
The workers, these kindly ones
who washed the rigid limbs
talked quietly as if in church.
And combed the long, grey hair
of Margaret who fell down
once too often, and for good.
And Frank who had owned
the restaurant a squabbling
family think they will inherit.
Billy—hit sideways on his bike
and gently gathered up in tears
by other rough Angels riders.
And now, instead of a song,
a high wailing lament begins
among these tongueless ones.
Mouths that once carried
the simple meanings of things
are cleansed of any speech,
back to before their birth,
restoring the voice’s power
in what it leaves unsaid.
Death, a speech murderer,
presses the fine satin lining
down to stifle the last words.
But the strangest thing is—
the strangest thing is—
we still hear those forgotten
words upstairs in the parlor,
passed from one to another,
above everything, giving love.
Off the Clock
When the horn blew, the men left the factory in groups,
smoking as everyone did in those days,
provided with cheap cartons of them from the PX.
They wore Goodwill overcoats, always smoking,
talking grown-up talk to each other and stragglers.
They crowded the pub and then self- exiled
to the back benches where the Bleachery & Dye
workers finished the day, as they avoided home.
These were old men well before their time
and wore a perpetual scowl even after the beer.
The bartender who owned the place did a
faultless impression of each of them, only after
they left the familiar stools or nearly collapsed
when they pushed open the heavy front door.
It was as though they had inherited a whole
generation’s thirst, all measured out in mugs.
At home they unlaced their boots on the porch
and plopped in an inherited fake-leather chair
and unbuttoned their collar and waistband.
No one dared speak in the house as they
settled, until after these bread-winners
broke bread and ate what the women plated.
Later in the living room where nothing was
lively, except the same radio programs and
the afternoon paper they held tight, but
that soon fell from still unwashed hands.
We knew that half this political ward would
turn out for their funerals and would pass
the news as they walked to the open grave.
* * *