The weather was good
for a burial, chilly
enough to make god
seem present, wholly
composed of breath, but not so
cold that the housefly
became memento
mori, no, just a black smudge
across the window
of the truck, a midge
that lit on the weather-strip,
then walked to the edge
of the sky, its striped
eyes seeing in mosaic
as the backhoe piped
black exhaust, the slack
on the pulley-belts stiffened,
the gravel grew slick
with rain, people fanned
out into the granite field
in thin lines to find
their cars, and I felt
by instinct that mammoth sense,
something like snowmelt
sped through the silence
of a slot canyon, I heard
that rough voice gone since
birth, before birth, heard
the earth darken shard by shard,
the broken, shattered
earth, the ground frozen too hard
to hollow by hand.
A Wallace Stegner Fellow, J.P. Grasser is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah, where he edits Quarterly West.