The fat converts to wax beneath the wet earth where the box
has let the groundwater in through the seams and the locks
of the casket that was guaranteed to last a hundred years,
and the body is becoming soap, rendering its fears
into a white and waxy substance that preserves the form
long after the flesh has given up the warm,
and the adipocere man lies in his coffin-turned-to-tub,
saponified, a candle in the subterranean club.
Adipocere, the body turning into soap,
adipocere, the biological envelope
of fat and alkaline and water and the underground,
preserving what was meant to rot in a waxy mound.
They dig them up sometimes, a century under the clay,
and find the face preserved in wax as if to say
that death is not the end of the appearance but the start
of a different kind of permanence, a posthumous art.
The features frozen in the tallow, recognizable still,
the hands like candles waiting for someone to light the wick and fill
the coffin with the warm glow of the rendered dead,
and the adipocere man sleeps in his waxy bed.
Grandfather was buried in 1943.
They moved the cemetery last year.
He looked exactly the same.
Waxy. White. Still smiling.