ANIMAL BURIAL
a poem from SIX MILE CORNER - 1966 Houghton Mifflin
ANIMAL BURIAL
Hugging his shoulders the half-year’s husband doesn’t make
a face of what he hears. “You cried
more than when your grandmother died.” Steeped
in a fried-rice colored robe, she tucks
her ankles on their couch and doesn’t budge.
A plow-prowed junk truck chugs in their cul-de-sac.
Akimbo spruces dripping tinsel plastic
bobble on its wake …
… Half on her half of the bed, he woke
thinking his back nudged her back, till she racked
the sink with last night’s plates and steak
fat. Naked,
he flushed his mouth with Coke, shrugging her kiss.
“Stop trying to make a you of me!” Had
last night’s quarrel counted down to this,
he seeing him in her? Shrouded
in his soiled white shirt, caged
finches chattered to a window shade
yellowing as snow
falling unfelt by him decreased its fall.
Stippled, the brown finch ticked a splotchy bar.
Green and croquette colored
its mate crouched
on the mottled millet and droppings crusted
cage floor.
The cage rocked when he stripped it like a jug.
He stooped to squint and kicked the telephone.
Bath toweling, the wife heard
him trash some drawers. The bird
scrawled in his hands cupped on a heating pad.
She gagged. he made
her eyedrop brandy in its craw,
which chirred
a little. White chenille
scoured their eyelids when it died.
The junk plow bawl and gouges in its rut.
“Death is what stops for you, not
what the tissue does,” She’d stroke
if she could, but
chides. I am the man
the boy was who buried pets. I take
the shovel with the shortest handle.
I wind the finch in Kleenex
in a cufflink box.
The napkin depth of frozen dirt
I gouge with a broomstick thickens in new snow.
I tamp it back.
When it thaws, the hole
will leave a dale.
My great grandmother’s near blizzard burial
the winter I had whooping cough, sagged like a fallen cake
when I first saw it. Springy,
rank, a bog until humped with turf.
In spring, the finch’s wing,
boxed in red velvet, will still be green.