Grounds Keeper

 

 

Grounds Keeper 

Then she was dead,

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                Clearances

 

Who knows what he goes in there for.

The stove’s cold, the window’s open

enough that there’s a sloe explosion

of snow as though the skin’s split

 

in between the thumb and one or

two other fingers, succumbing, as it does,

to such tender pressure.  It’s along

the fold of the tatted cushion, that

 

snow.  Some as come in small balls.  

He’s going for broke, maybe,

having thrown in or out and it’s not all

landed yet whatever bone with its pricked

little dots.  And outside the tatter of some 

jack-hammer rugged against the new

year freeze, and all that it takes away

with it to bury her with some gauzed 

composition of dignity.  Mostly It enters 

the froze as stone  

burial home, mostly he’s on his own

and he thoroughly parts the rugged

tomb air, his home out of home for the last

thirty-odd years.   How it’s all exhausted, 

how all the breath is bested by the bittering

wind.  He’s hatless.  He thumbs the run

of dust the grunge among the loved

things: a cup, a clam hoe, a bucket,

a cover for that bucket, that, if he looks

through his breath, is rimmed with her

favorite blue, chipped and almost all washed

off except for that underneath, how 

it’s fresh as off the shelf, or just,

and set tenderly at home to keep

what’s in it in and what’s out 

of it out.