THE REST

At the Cemetery on Dwight Hasty’s Farm in New Market, Alabama

Presences here and strange cries
far up out over the loblolly pines. Last winter’s slash

and burn burgeoning, a rattle
not key, not gate. And nothing’s there

but the redbird tingling his single, secret
hidden air around this crown of brambles, blackberry,

soon to be laden, still bare. Dare
further, push the brush. You will risk waking

these graven images, lichened
to lost lambs. Mothers, sons, they sometimes lasted

six months, four days, a year, or after.

The moss a mercy, flaking, eases the deepcut names that run
almost frail now. Flailing, a thrasher

beats the bushes, wildeyed. Cross.

Echoes the yellowhammer’s ratatat whapping.
Attuned now, he chips at days, yammering

up the rutted track, a dead end, one way.
He’ll trace the slab hewn flat down as an a tomb, a vacant altar

for what women need, seek, give, but seldom get,
either from the weary or the wicked: rest.

It’s deeper than you’d believe. Where wild dogwood,
chinquapin bloom, what’s rotting can, and soon will ripen;

taproot, time, crack all design. Little by little, line by line, we are

all leaving. Below the sassafras, buds branching,
here lies Buck, a Navy flier, 1941.

Sudden as spring by the iron paling,
utterly silent (I’ll never know

what foot, scrambling, staggered that rolled stone)
-- in that instant, rushing, risen, up, away, six does, four fawns vaulted the decrepit railing -

then empty. And nothing
but the deer departed.