Her vertebra I touched only once after seven

years of bad marriage, a depression, a dimpled spine,

she said it was her father hit her there

with a board once, and no, it didn't hurt,

not now. I felt it, rubbed it gently,

but in my arms she always was elsewhere,

the woman a casket in a town of too many

empty caskets, the stock-pile town waiting

for a disaster in Mexico to be of any earthly

use. I wasn't dead, so what use to me

a wife who was an empty casket with a dent

in the lid where her father struck again

each day of her life?

​

She would not open her lid for me at night.

I lay beside her on the narrow bed,

felt her cold steel side next to me. I knew

she wanted to be in the ground, in a nice

concrete crypt, waterproof, quiet, and dry,

only the crickets winding and unwinding their legs

like silk ribbon rubbed on silk ribbon in her hair,

hair of the dead, hair of the woman in the casket,

hair that grew, long after her death, grew out

through spaces between the lid and the box, hair

growing through screw holes, around screws, pushing

them out, pushing the screws, spiraling around

the screws, then in their animal cuticle way

twisting the screws of her casket, backing

them out, loosening the hinges and joints

of the casket.

​

                       I could hear the dead

woman's hair growing at night, I could hear it

beside me, like insect breathing,

a tiny panting sound, just for seconds,

then silent. Her hair knew I was listening

and waited. After I fell asleep her hair

twisted the screws and the squeaking woke me.

My eyes shot wide open and I discovered

myself, there in my body, holding my breath,

beside my wife who was a steel casket

the color of dark wine in the midnight room,

slowly coming apart as the hair pushed out

through every opening she couldn't stop up,

no matter how hard she shut the lid. It would out!

​

I waited to see the woman inside. I imagined

a black desiccated head resting upon

a silk pillow dreaming of a dry crypt

as her hair and nails grew; hating all water,

dreading moisture's corrupting effects, her black,

retreating nose not daring to move because

she might smell the decay, smell the hand of her father

the butcher, smell the butcher's block she washed

with bleach every night, retreat from the smell of blood,

pork fat, bleach, retreat from the blades

her father swung, the board he banged on her casket

to make that dent I felt only once in the seventh

year of a bad marriage on the night I learned

my wife was a casket in a casket town

just waiting for a disaster.

​

So I bought her a crypt, a sarcophagus,

really. I knew a place in Evanston

that made monuments, beside the elevated

railway embankment I used to pass every day

riding my bicycle to school. Ellis Monuments.

The cemetery across the road was their best

advertising. Angels of stone, sweet darlings

like frozen flames, rippling upward like spires,

wings of stone fire, on pedestals, like trophies;

that's what I wanted for my wife, and though

I had to pay dearly, I convinced Mr. Ellis to carve

an upright crypt, a hollow sarcophagus

for my wife.

​

                   I placed her inside and sealed

her in. She was happy, dry at last, and if

she fell apart, no one would be the wiser.

​

A lovely pedestal! Stone scrolls hugged

the base, the column fluted at the edges rose

eight feet, topped by a little girl in a gown,

with angel's wings. I wanted limestone, so lovely

as it decays, as rain washes it down; after

a hundred years, not even the inscription

could be deciphered, that look of melted tallow

I treasured in old stones, old graveyards;

the nameless dead. But limestone was out of the question, Ellis said, for a crypt, a sarcophagus

under the stars, absorbing lunar cold

and stellar inertia, soaking up all that stillness;

no, I needed stone that would outlast the moon

and pinpricks of the stars, the arctic shudder

in the vacuum, desiccating space,

the earth a droplet spinning, hard and jewel-like,

creamy swirls on its tiny self-sustaining

skin. I wanted limestone that would melt,

but she wanted granite that would stay hard,

would not crack under glaciers but would roll

smaller and smaller until it was only a pebble,

and inside safe still a tiny casket,

all fallen to pieces by then but dry, still dry,

by then a tight ball of hair.

​

                                          So I asked old Ellis

to do it in granite, which he did, delivered it

on a flatbed truck to the cemetery plot

I purchased for this purpose of enthroning

my casket under the moon, and on cold nights

kissed by the moon I came to the graveyard

and laced my fingers through the chain link fence,

I pressed my face against the chain, so like

her touch, the feel of her, I watched the moon

cold kissing her polished granite pedestal.

​

One night, the moon full, I made my way down

brain-gray streets to my place at the fence,

to my cemetery; she was gone,

and in her place only a hole where she'd sunk

of her own weight to the center of the earth;

I didn't follow her down. Instead I shivered,

went home cold and pleased to be alone and

slept alone at last.

​