Classic Poem

What to do with our dead ... We beg
pardon, good neighbor; no offense is meant
if your old broken body (turned
briefly to marble) now we drag
through all we have ever thought on death. . . .

Shy as an ovenbird, sometimes
she would hide from her friends, and surely
it is nothing of hers, this immense
centrality. Surely among all the voices
and phone calls and importance of cars coming
and going up the dirt road
there is shrilly absent her own
exasperated " Oh
for god's sake, take it out and bury it! "

... Which ceased like an old horse folding
its knees in a field, or a gull
offshore and alone, the sea
(or the hills)
seconding with a wave
that is neither hail nor farewell. Indeed,

it is more like looking seaward
into simple geometry
or at hills above timberline
than " seeing-for-the-last-time "
someone we knew. Who'd have believed
she could be so indifferent, either
to our love or our nuisance,
as to lie still and say no more,
nor less, than the face of a cliff?
Yet she always meant what she said,
and vice versa. This, then, must be it:
an indifference so great
(and all the greater if
in cold contrast to a bent
beloved figure and funny hat)
it frightens us, being what no one
can compass and live.

Of course, we do not yet know
what " live " means. —
To have been timid,
yet stubborn?
To have known no man,
to have kept Shetland ponies and cats,
to have sagged into old age, toil-
broken at fifty-five?

To have held together an in-
computable cosmos of cells?
To have come and gone like a frost-
crystal, by sidereal time?

One morning she hauled a dead fowl
to the fox-den up on the kame. She knew
who it was fled with a swish and a thud
at midnight, dumping his ballast.
She figured he'd earned it — and " the damn hen
was dead anyhow " ... One time,
she was paid-down on a house
in the next state, her goods half packed;
and had so much fun at the farewell party
she was still here ten years later. —
Still doing the cooking, the barn chores (a ton
of dung every day), the garden,
the Shetland breeding and showing — but more
slowly each year, the flesh
heavier on the bone, the bone
bleaker with damp when the wind
swung easterly. You could say:
" The poor soul wore herself out " , or:
" She had not been happy of late. "

But who is? — and don't
we pursue rather than have
happiness? Almost by definition,
then, it is somewheres else —
a moving target we have to lead a little
to wing at all. . . .

From the vantage point of a pile
of packing crates, all but moved,
she could see suddenly, and behind her,
the elusive aura.
Quiet now, she may know
whether it's better to be worn out
by dragging your own rainbow
or by running after it, dragging
everything else.

And what to do with the dead
when we are not allowed
to bury them under the Ben Davis trees
in the orchard, or heap up old pony traps,
saddles and studbooks and ribbons,
and sprinkle with gasoline and let it all go
and the dead with it straight up
into the sky ... One thing,
at least, needn't worry us:
If there's little talk about God
and Hereafter and angels (which she
would have none of) What is —
and what was , Vera — surely
are catechism enough.