The Pallbearers

Six men in suits they didn’t wear quite right,
uncomfortable in the formality of it,
carrying the box in the specific light
of a cold morning, each one in the kit
of obligation and love that he’d somehow
accumulated through the years of being
the man he was, each pallbearer’s brow
carrying the weight of the final freeing.

The pallbearers carry more than what’s inside the box,
they carry every memory the loss unlocks,
the fishing trips and arguments and borrowed tools,
the decades of a friendship and its rules,
the pallbearers carry more than what’s inside the box.

My brother was the one on the left front corner
and I could see from where I sat exactly what
it cost him, could see the mourner
in him managing the lift, the gut
of it, the physical final service
for the man who’d taught him how to cast a line,
the carrying across the church’s surface
to the hearse, the last dignified sign.

There’s no road map for what the pallbearers feel
in the space between the church and the long car,
the ceremonial weight that makes it real
in a way that the service hadn’t quite come far
enough to do: the physical fact of it,
the box, the weight, the actual carrying out
of the person you have loved and called it fit
to honor him this way without a shout.