Grave Digger in the Rain Imagines Ireland

Grave Digger in the Rain Imagines Ireland

Clay is the word and clay is the flesh...
                                  Patrick Kavanagh

It’s his mud.

Where it pimples

and puckers. 

He can’t see  

the spade. And every drop

of viscous spit

is gone and it’s nothing

but wet tack, sod, 

a whole round globe

of a summer's dry heave/wet

peat, slung

in the sun, bricked,

each precious inch

sinking to be sucked 

dry by the hot throat

of the sky whose esoph-

agus is broader,

wider than

the turf spade and all her

intentions.  And each

slice he now pulls

up, this pyramid

of dirt tumbles back

into his precisely gridded

grave.   They are so close.
Like trundles
in a fever hospital.

The morning was tar 

dark. The morning was rain,

was sludge, was the bottom

of his sanity.  He’d wanted

it dry.  Dry as summer

coal.  Dry as white cedar

bark.  He wanted

a drink.  But even if

there were he wouldn’t…

wouldn’t.  Not here. 

Not this dig.  Or the six

before.  Or the six

yet to come.  The itch.

The pucker.  The mud

and soon, though whose to know: 

the sun.

He plunges the spade.  

Lifts the dirt.  Sings

or rather gurgles.  He can't

sing.  But he tries.  Here,

before the crowds arrive,

and in the rain,

he tries.