A Funeral in the Piedmont

A Funeral in the Piedmont

A clear sun semi-circle,

Flat and dusty cemetery off a two-lane Reidsville highway,

In the yard of an old wood church and tobacco barns:

No one cries.

Not from uncaring or meanness,

Only from not knowing what to do.

My uncle Rueben seldom spoke to others

And kept to himself, with his greasy instruments.

 - Off to my left a black man dozes in his digging machine

And accidentally knocks it in gear, lurches backward

Into a cement angel, crashing with a final destructive stone clap.

The preacher never stops

As my grandmother utters a bitter oath

With layers of old racism,

And a vicious personal insult to the man she apparently knows.

Her voice hums like a bitter string, and

I pinch myself through my suit, and finally dig a small knife blade

Into my thigh to keep from laughing,

Because she is so vivid in her description,

And because she means it and is still harmless

In the way that only old women can be.

 Summer, 1980s-

A long maroon Pontiac creeps to the edge of the driveway,

A large southern black woman

In a house dress and slippers

Shuffles up the smooth asphalt,

Raises her hand and cries out smiling.

I watch from under the sycamore.

My grandmother shades her eyes from the doorway

Walks from the carport,

Also smiling.

Memory-

I would like to hear the tune Bud would have played

If he had known about his own service.

I had often played his ancient Gibson banjo

Black and greased

Ringing cat-gut echoes

Heavy and humming- taught, stamped in Kalamazoo -

Which stayed under the guest room bed

As my uncle slipped farther away

Into himself, without caring.

He was the seventh born son

Of a seventh born son,

And so was known to be apart.

Sometimes his brothers would carry him

In their old cars to play in fire departments

Or the churches of Baptists or Methodists

To be a part of the loud ringing choir

And he would hear the words of mothers

And women, fathers and sons

All without understanding.

It must have been one long glorious echo

That carried with him all times

Through dark nights without dark

In the moving mouths of people

As others were born and died

He saw this without understanding.

Dark, summer, 1990s.

Music floats across the tobacco field

I stand in the yard alone

Outside the house

Where my grandparents hide themselves

From a world becoming another place

Neighbors have died

And the music is alien to them.

Inside the sun-circle:

Afterward,

I look backward out the car window

As the slick suited man drives us

And the dust settles around the upright stones.

The black man has righted the angel;

He readies the earth for the grave,

And my uncle, still silent

Is lowered again.