Decoration Day

No funeral today, but the town 
has business at its cemetery. 
Dust leads the procession; 
handles of rakes and hoes protrude 
from pickup beds, trunks of cars. 
Hardened hands grip steering wheels 
jounced by the washboard road, stabilize
Mason jars filled with bridal wreath, 
peonies, forsythia, iris—called flags. 
New this year: coat hanger wreaths 
made of pastel tissues. 

A coyote evacuates; rabbits 
and desert rats crouch in burrows 
made precarious, while boots 
and sturdy shoes make a day of it. 
Front-aproned women, some 
with bargain names already carved, 
bend and fuss at mounds 
as if their dead are sick or on a trip; 
weathered men hoe tumbleweeds, 
scratch at dirt, lean on tools, 
pull handkerchiefs from back pockets,
blow and snuffle. 

Death is so dry. Dusty children 
drink from the single tap, 
wipe their mouths, trudge the perimeter,
wrestle through stories of loss 
in childbirth, orphans, drowning, 
choking. They hear the syllables 
of influenza, consumption, meningitis.
They stop for a shooting accident, 
a man who tripped on his shoelaces. 
At lightning, one looks at the black cloud
growing above fifty-mile mountain.