The shovel exhausted all forms of being before settling into this one. Its character is clear. It defies cleanliness and shine. In every country, in every century, it performs the elemental rite of all humanity. Turns the soil for planting: potatoes, corn, the body of a cat, a child, a woman. There is no monotony in this. Long ago it lost its grip on time. You’d swear it is a noun but it’s a verb, in stasis, waiting in the shed for a shift in circumstance or season. Winter, the ground frozen three feet down, gives the shovel many hours to call up from its past the roots of words. Weary once meant to plod through mud. Hussy meant a country wife, who would have been handy with any outdoor tool. Though the shovel is used to cover up, it never falsifies. Nor does it show charity: made for hand and foot, it bends the back, stiffens the muscles of legs and arms, blisters. In a garden of graves, the shovel is sorrow’s tool. Its soul is iron and wood. No matter how long its exile from the dig, there is the good earth, waiting.