Burial

From a window I watch

                        the librarian kneel
            in the parking lot as if to pray.

He bows his head. Pleats the soil.
            Tucks a sapling into a box

                        like a casket.

So many hearses loop by the library
            when I visit. I wonder why

                        it’s quiet today.
            No sirens. No circling gulls.

I’m eight and I want to ask him
            about the word, undertaker,

                        why he dresses the rootlets,
            irons dirt with his hands.

Beside the boarded homes
            and broken beer bottles

                        kids my age sit on the curb
            of Prospect Street and wait.

None of us know what green is
            yet, how we will grow,

                        rewilding over concrete.

Watercress, fistfuls of mint,
            sugar maples. Lobed

                        to camouflage what remains
            cuffed, to the chain-link fence.