Today we lowered into the ground a man in a casket.  As if a casket could contain him. As if earth at 72 cubic feet could suppress human life any more than the five letter simplicity, death. Death is a funny thing. Maybe because it’s supremely unfunny, and because I, like most people with a healthy survival sense, hold it—its entire nothingness— as clawing obsession.

The man we lowered into the ground was a great man. Not a good man, but a great man. The kind of man whose charity and steadfastness couldn’t be thwarted by mortality. His true legacy thrives as a waterfall, a community of perpetuation, where kindness breathed by one body takes on the aerial view through decades.  He planted mustard seeds, the kind that do the most growing.

Now his hair and skin reflect chapel lights in a warm, rose-scented room.  Now the preacher speaks of returning to the fold; now in folds of creased skin hides shadows of stories, of smiles, of loss, of a life once cherished and now obstinately still.  Not resting, like Newton’s rule: An object at rest will remain at rest until acted upon.  Push and pull if you like, against the stiff suit, the starch, the maple wood box.  

Now we carry him outside; sunlight warming the skin under black wool, as the memorial guard fire a veteran’s salute.  Go out with a bang. How hideous the throbbing life and thought that dare impinge headstone silence! Funerals are for the living, whispers some mother or cousin on the astroturf above the dead grass and Sunday-finest bone. Now we leave. We leave the man in the box above the ground.  We grab coffee and fast food.  We move, all of us, to cars and homes, a scattering of dust on water. He, remains. 

Grackles caw as the man in jeans loosens the crankshaft.  I am in the old house touching the walls and clicking against the nude floor.  The box sinks into the marble vault, the lid subsumed into earth. They’ve painted the blue room white, and the creaking playhouse still has wasps nested in its corners. 

I stood in the entryway by the grandfather clock to see again the backyard symmetry of pool, shrubs, and stairs.  Balance broken by pool-framing planters, one in sunset, one in shadow, facing each other but always apart.  There is no understanding the unreachable. But even the sun can’t stop its setting, and the heavenly perpetual motion propelled me forwards, beyond the door of the white house on the hill, far beyond the plot so near to the ground where, eventually, I will be lowered in a polite hush by a stranger with a hydraulic wench.