A Fierce Love
Why can’t love be as fierce,
penetrating and powerfully physical
as working on the Pipe Crew
for Perini Construction building Route 91?
We young men shoveled Vermont’s rocky soil,
leaning into the digging –
our bodies sunk into breaking up dirt,
persistent, swinging shovels
like baseball bats at times,
bodies projected into crusty, pebble-strewn soil,
absorbed in the moment of scratching and digging
a frenzy of physical desire,
sweating and attacking
until we had trenched into the earth.
I dug the hard-packed earth
next to Diana’s granite marker
in back of the Cutchogue Methodist Church’s cemetery,
scraping the stubborn dirt
to prepare a suitable place
to bury her ashes.
My hands and upper arms trembled,
recalling my construction days
as I deposited Diana’s
burnt up bones into the ground.
Because of an early hurricane,
the lilacs bloomed that September,
splashy with colors and new life.