Burial

Because the Upshur County Coroner’s Code
4(d) holds that no death within the county’s
dominion can be certified without the coroner’s
or a state-licensed examiner’s or a physician’s
signature, I will have to keep your promise
that your bastard death remain illegitimate,
to transport your body a thousand miles south
to the mangrove fraying with Spanish moss,
to the humus heatening even at night
with decay, to the mounding dirt, to the air
rotting with water and mold, to the carnivorous
ants. The corpse that I will lay upon this ground
will have abandoned its weight, and I will
whisper to its insentient ear words about
birds feeding from the unburrowing worms,
about this good, felonious life, about what I
cannot relinquish of the body. Or rather,
I will cup from the earth a fist of grass
and sprinkle the grass upon its hair, and years
later, when some state’s authorities will
recover the remains, some teeth, a pelvis bone,
they will find a shock of peat grass
the color of your living hair. I am not
foretelling the truth. That body will be
carpeted with the clutter of forested debris,
but nothing will happen, except for the old,
additioned loss, the incremental silence,
unauthorized, as indomitable as the great
need of the body to die, simply to die.

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