Claude
With 'he' consigned to Hell in the opening line, the speaker turns not to grief but to watching 'musrats' work 'One hole then out the other', changing it 'like arithematic / a yard away'. The poem makes a small philosophy of trapping - 'Seal one side / do the other' - then climbs into the 'fifty five quarter ton / yellow pick truck, still tight as a / drum' and drives 'to town', ending on a noticing detail, 'a a / part of the reatale had wooden walk'.
The damnation in the first line is dispatched so fast it reads as settled accounts, not loss; the rest of the poem is pure occupied attention. The muskrat passage is quietly devastating as a self-portrait of survival - you 'Seal one side / do the other', you 'Figer out that you have been had', and then 'O well, just do it again'. That refrain is the poem's whole ethic of getting on: repetition as resilience. The truck, lovingly specified down to its tightness 'as a drum', is the vehicle out of the house and out of mourning, and the poem closes on plain observation of a wooden walk, as if the cure for someone going to Hell is simply to keep one's eyes on the next ordinary surface.