Sand Burial

Before tractors buried her father

who would have loved to watch the work

of those machines, earthmovers, like himself—

the way good men pulled levers to lift his vault lid,

suspended like a Frank Lloyd Wright cantilever

hovering over the eternal balcony of death,

that bardo where inside marries outside,

and lowered one end perfectly above him

until one lip slipped into the vault’s rim

and made the opposite end quaver

(That’s how you know male meets female,

the undertaker said with pride in his men,

artists, he called them, for knowing

the subtle arts of the trade: See, that’s when

they know the concrete seam will seal, their signal

to lower the lid the rest of the way)—

the woman with her teenage son in grandpa’s

cap, grey hairs and spiced sweat still in the band,

threw fistfuls of sand into the hole

then shovelfuls, to finally let his chronic absence go,

resurrecting now the memory of that day her father

fished small grains of sand from her red eyes

with tissue he had wadded to a point,

that tenderness, the lingering sting.