My daddy is the cemetery man.

They call him any time somebody’s passed
And a grave needs to be marked.

He doesn’t do the digging,
But he does the talking and the listening,
The teller of stories and the mourner’s confidant
As he himself is well-acquainted with grief:
A wonderful counselor for students
But also for all those in the doctor’s waiting room,
In the checkout line at Dollar General,
On an airplane,
In a restaurant.
They are drawn as flies to honey.

When I was young he had me pull that red book off the shelf,
Filled with poetry and stories
With his underlined phrases and starred portions
And I watched him read it:
Man and His Measure.

I know what it means now.

The young say he’s a boomer,
the epitome of the word.
The base in Vietnam was under attack
The night that he arrived,
But I always preferred to hear about the lizards
Slithering into the hooches,
Scurrying away from the light.

The old timers say he’s a mess
And ask if he’s behaving.
The man never meets a stranger,
Unless it was that poor worker at the Hardee’s
Who couldn’t sling the biscuits fast enough
On a busy morning when we were headed to the Gulf,
And there was a fit pitched
That I, a witness of one, can testify to seeing.

I don’t believe we left that day 
With heavy bags of grease and eggs
But we ate Beenie Weenies from the can
With crackers, Vienna sausages, and cheese
While he put the cricket on the hook
And sipped a Sundrop 
And caught the bream on their beds,
A good mess.

He could have been a talk show host,
But he became a teacher, 
A veteran,
A planner,
A farmer,
A thinker,
A hunter,
A list-maker,
A fisher of men in distressed times,
Pulling them up from the creek
Catch-and-release style,
A good mess.

And he became a father 
Who loves Ecclesiastes.
(To everything there is a season)
And time’s a wasting, so he says.
So it’s time to mow,
It’s time to harvest,
It’s time to take a nap,
For the afternoon work
Before the sun goes down
Is clearing old and faded flowers off the graves
To honor memory with the fresh and new.

He has a map of them all.

It’s his job.

My daddy is the cemetery man.