There sits the bereaved, all one averted gaze.

A plastic electric candlestick. Her air

is the grinding of a wool sweater

between rows of white and wooden teeth.

 

Her brother-in-law is speaking. A recitative,

second-act bass aria: he lungs righteous air,

conducts himself with a public finger,

his beard trimmed close. He sings of being

 

right – in which pursuit he’s held the record

since the two boys could pitch and catch,

trap muskrats, get grades and beatings. Of how

he always brought the car home on time

 

he sings, while his younger sandwich-bag of ash

once left the lunch table at the lake camp

in New Hampshire for a walk alone,

only to phone in August from Galveston. Not once,

 

twice. Had run casino money. Pointed a gun.

Gave up teaching to farm and write poetry, married

this pewed woman second in her own backyard

without their mother’s blessing or witness.

 

He doesn’t mention the high-school redhead,

Gretchen, or the night they blood-knuckled

each other until the mild, middle-school principal

father figure hid upstairs and wept, “I tried. I tried.”

 

So he’s now, and therefore forever, undefeatedly

correct. His favorite sister nods. His established

children wait and listen in the churchy vacuum.

Another handful of sharp-jawed siblings

 

shift inside off-the-rack blazers and chew a cheek.

The bereaved, who forbore then, still forbears.

She thinks of the summer that was two months ago,

driving her husband to the now-crowded lake

 

they sold their share of, so two old men

could sail and talk and gin and tonic. That night

for once, at dinner, they told stories together

to grandchildren: no and yes and world twice past.

 

Now, the live one is waving a shroud.

Later, he and his tribe will park blinding cars

over a matted pasture they don’t recognize.

The same grandchildren will straddle haybales,

 

the suits will follow a priest up a skidder path

to a copse of brushed-out sumac, will watch

two half-brothers, twenty-one years apart,

cut into the root-wrenched gravel bite

 

by bite with a post-hole digger and shovel,

to lower a handmade cherry box, one hand apiece

over each milled end, unnecessary for such

a diminished thing, into a new hole

 

near the collie. The old boy will hold

his son’s elbow, feel the tailored sleeve,

and under that, the banded flesh,

and under that, the sharpening spur.