Five short lines carry a whole attitude: death as an appointment in somebody's diary rather than a thunderclap. In "Clerking for Death," Dave Bonta takes the most solemn occasion we have, the funeral, and files it among a clerk's other tasks. The reader is left to decide whether that is a joke, a confession or a quiet horror.
The title sets the terms. "Clerk" is usually a noun, a person who copies and files. Turned into a verb, it becomes a job description, and "for Death" supplies the employer. Death here is less a mysterious force than a firm, and the speaker is on its payroll. The first line backs this up: "Clerks go to burial." Mourners and family are absent, and the people who turn up are the record-keepers.
The comparison that follows is deliberately flat: burial is "like any other full / or ill business." The line break matters. The familiar phrase "for good or ill" has been bent, and "full" stands where "good" should be. A full business is a busy, thriving one, and an ill business is a sick or shady one. Either way the clerk treats it the same. The two words also lean on each other, since "full" and "ill" share their double *l*, and spoken quickly they may faintly echo "fulfil," as in duties fulfilled and boxes ticked. Breaking the line after "full" leaves the word hanging for a beat, like a ledger column waiting for its figure.
Then the pronoun shifts. The clerks were "they," and suddenly it is "We talk gravely." The speaker has joined the group, and the reader is nudged to join too. "Gravely" is the poem's neatest pun. It means seriously, but it contains "grave," and we are standing at one. Notice also that the word describes how the clerks talk, not what they feel. Gravity becomes a manner, a professional tone put on like a black tie. The poem quietly asks how much of ceremonial solemnity is performance, and it doesn't answer.
The last line is the strangest: "eat ink and point." Two blunt verbs, no adjectives. "Eat ink" recalls the idiom of eating one's words but makes it physical, so that words become the black stuff itself, swallowed. A clerk who lives on ink is fed by paperwork and perhaps poisoned by it. Ink is also the colour of mourning clothes, so the image works at both levels. "Point" is just as flexible. It could be a finger tapping a name in a register, or the place on a form where a signature goes. It might also be the point of a pen. In British usage a full stop is called a "full point," so the final word may quietly answer the "full" of line three and close the poem with a mark of punctuation. That last link is an inference, but the poem's wordplay makes it a tempting one.
The form is as pared down as the sentiment. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. By my count the lines run to about six syllables, then six, then shrink to four, four and four, so the poem tightens as it goes, from the loose sweep of "like any other full" to the clipped closing pair. The hard consonants in "clerks," "talk," "ink" and "point" give the ending a clicking, scratching sound, like a pen working through a list. Because nothing rhymes, nothing resolves. The poem stops on a gesture rather than a conclusion, as a clerk's day ends without any sense of an ending.
The poem is significant for what it declines to do. It offers no consolation and no lament for the dead, and the dead are barely present. Its subject is the people who handle death with words and forms, and its dark comedy comes from how easily they slip into routine. Because of the "we," and because the work is writing, it is tempting to read the clerks as a self-portrait of anyone who puts death into language, poets included. That is an interpretation, not a fact, but the poem invites it. It also leaves a gentler reading open. Pointing at a name and writing it down is, after all, one way a community records that someone lived. The poem lets both thoughts stand, the cold one and the tender one, and in five lines that is a good deal to hold.