Country Burial

    Charlotte Hilary Matthews

She is not afraid of the snow for her household;
For all her household are clothed with scarlet.
- The Book of Proverbs


A pitch cold February and the preacher's voice, rolling louder,
has turned brittle and dry as stubble in the field.
He insists on where she will go. I think of clouds, how they thicken,
of how bees will multiply on the flowers of her grave.
In April bright grass will push through the invisible crease.
People walking will say it is a new grave:
Nellie Hall, married sixty-nine years, her children's
children far from her. Once, on a long afternoon in May,
I watched her husband dig a perfect line of holes
while she dropped a kernel into each,
covering it afterwards with the fine earth.

Now he divides a bale into single bricks for his herd
who come right up to him.
He does this so slowly he seems not to be moving
and I wonder how it would be to move after that,
how everything must look vague, the delicate circles
his cows pace out no more a design to remember for her,
or the bull calf, born into the blizzard, which first got up
onto the half-leg, kneeling, then all the way,
which will not go beyond his thinking but remain
there the way an act of kindness, the man who pulls
his neighbour's truck from the ditch in the dark
or the child who sees his grandfather alone
and sits with him, goes unnoticed, just ends.