Funeral
by B.J. Buckley
In the cemetery, dry grass waist high: the man hired to mow, dead himself
mowing his own sparse hay, hardly worth cutting after months of drought.
Forgotten crosses, milk-paint white chewed away by mice, scoured by harsh
judgments of wind, fallen all askew like our own failed crooked tries at grace.
New grave took two days to dig. Curly wouldn’t use the backhoe, insisted on
his own precise square corners, said it takes a body to bury one, human sweat,
human arms to lift the earth away, and after, in the quiet, to set it back down.
At the church a little while ago the part-time preacher waited for the pews to fill,
and someone had to tell him seventeen was all of us except for Curly, who was
still out there in the wind praying with his shovel. We didn’t need the book to sing
the hymns or say the psalms, and the preacher hadn’t known old Emmet, so Clay
stood to give the eulogy, short and sweet, Ecclesiastes, those verses like a poem
about the seasons, and that verse about flesh and grass, which for us was literal as
well as spiritual, and was waiting on us pitching out the bales when this was done.
B.J. Buckley is a Montana poet who has worked as a teaching artist in Arts-in-Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for over four decades. She has recent/forthcoming work in Calyx, Grub Street, Sugar House Review, and Whitefish Review.
