Sled Burial, Dream Ceremony by James Dickey While the south rains, the north Is snowing, and the dead southerner Is taken there. He lies with the top of his casket Open, his hair combed, the particles in the air Changing to other things. The train stops In a small furry village, and men in flap-eared caps And others with women's scarves tied around their heads And business hats over those, unload him, And one of them reaches inside the coffin and places The southerner's hand at the center Of his dead breast. They load him onto a sled, An old-fashioned sled with high-curled runners, Drawn by horses with bells, and begin To walk out of town, past dull red barns Inching closer to the road as it snows Harder, past an army of gunny-sacked bushes, Past horses with flakes in the hollows of their sway-backs, Past round faces drawn by children On kitchen windows, all shedding basic-shaped tears. The coffin top still is wide open; His dead eyes stare through his lids, Not fooled that the snow is cotton. The woods fall Slowly off all of them, until they are walking Between rigid little houses of ice-fishers On a plain which is a great plain of water Until the last rabbit track fails, and they are At the center. They take axes, shovels, mattocks, Dig the snow away, and saw the ice in the form Of his coffin, lifting the slab like a door Without hinges. The snow creaks under the sled As they unload him like hay, holding his weight by ropes. Sensing an unwanted freedom, a fish Slides by, under the hole leading up through the snow To nothing, and is gone. The coffin's shadow Is white, and they stand there, gunny-sacked bushes, Summoned from village sleep into someone else's dream Of death, and let him down, still seeing the flakes in the air At the place they are born of pure shadow Like his dead eyelids, rocking for a moment like a boat On utter foreignness, before he fills and sails down.
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