Friday, January 2, 2015

Gravedigger: How to Choose Where to Point the Spade



It’s just this one 
dig.  Until it’s the next one
dig, one of twelve.

It’s the itch.
Where it pimples
and puckers. 

He can’t resist. 
Even when every drop
of viscous spit

is gone and it’s nothing
but dry track,
a whole long road

of last week’s dry
peat trucked, slung
in the sun, bricked

high, each precious inch
sucked dry by
the hot throat

of sun whose esoph-
agus is longer than,
more endless than

the globe and all her
longitudes.  And each
shovel he now pulls

up, her pyramid
of dirt tumbling back
into the precisely gridded

grave.  It is tar dark.
The morning downpour,
her sludge, the bottom

is thick custard.  He’d wanted
it dry.  Dry as pressed
coal.  Dry as red winter cedar,

waiting.  Even if
there were flint
the spark wouldn’t…

wouldn’t.  Not here. 
Not this dig.  Or the six
before.  Or the five

yet to come.  The itch.
The pucker.  The mud
and the sun.



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