How Illuminate, Uncovering You
How today’s sun rises on yesterday’s labor,
how the now dug out stump slumps on the lip
of the incision I made into the crab
grass sod. & then
there’s the one that wouldn’t
budge, rebellious-wedged.
How more & more it is
being made naked again
plunge shovel
plnge shovel grunt shovel
how once there must have been a structure:
a house or barn, something.
How what I’m hauling
up is just the broke stone.
Oh but yesterday, how
a splinter, a sliver of window glass, somewhere near
that cemented dead elm.
Once
an elm
plunge
shovel plunge shovel grunt shovel
always? How Gerry dug
into the buried bark, or tried
to. How it was hard
hard hard. How it was hard as Egypitan
brickwork. How the
spade blade made a great thwang
and how later I’d remember I saw sparks speak. . .
how the teeth were meeting iron. How one nail, stoppered
all these years
plunge
hammer plunge shove grunt shovel
and met, well, tooth and nail. How it was the fleetingist
of lights. Tinder’s
friction, tipped. How it resembled the lightning
bugs up near the gone-by mountain
laurel, those now spent flowers a still branch-gripped
bouquet
in the slight alcove of the oak it was
cultivated in.
plunge shovel plunge shovel grunt shovel
How I saw them in their linen-like winding sheet,
their rag & bone man hold, their fisted grip that will
get them
through to near a year from now, the shoulders
of those oaks holding the snow,
their growth, seed & leaf, wind pillaged,
crow stole, and all those suns long ago shone,
plunge
come up! plunge shovel grunt shovel
& that open hole, half an acre or so over
there, how it is exhumed again to its cellared parapets,
the light of day once more being squeezed
between pieces of granite that for the last hundred
fifty years, tally the elm rings, how they have hunkered
demolished long before I was born and worn,
dumped into its own cellar hole,
shovel shovel
shovel of soil,
how with squirrel buried acorns championing
the purposely planted elm.
Mute. Rising blind into light.
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