Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Barrow  
Brandon Courtney

The same bedsheets my father used
              to swaddle the body of our border collie

were stretched and tucked for years
              around the cold slab of his mattress.

In the wheelbarrow’s basin I can
              make out the cotton’s pleats, starched

and pressed along their creases, the faint
              smell of lavender lifting from the fabric.

The pushcart’s wheel slips in the lawn’s
              divots. The collie, heavy and cumbersome

like a flat tire, shifts in the wagon’s bowl,
              a tuft of fur blinking beneath sleep’s

fragile curtain. My father bundles tools
              in the net of his arms and follows: canvas

tarp for fill-soil, bentgrass seed, a knot
              of butcher’s twine to cordon off the plot.

We snap plumb the ghost line of blue
              chalk onto the slate of turf, draw the tape

measure’s yellow ribbon taut, stake
              a width of ground with sharpened dowels;

more like sculpting the shape of grace
              than hollowing clay for a grave. We boot

the blades and bury the body beneath
              the sawtooth’s canopy, enough shade

to bandage the land. My mother patiently
              watches, wanting nothing more than for us

to be done with digging, exhausted
              by the precision in our labor, the ease

with which we wield grief’s implements.

 

Brandon Courtney spent four years in the United States Navy. His work is forthcoming or appears in Best New Poets 2009, Linebreak, BOXCAR Poetry Review, The Raleigh Review, Tar River Review, and The Los Angeles Review among many others, and he has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is a finalist for the Oboh Poetry Prize. He attends the MFA program at Hollins University.