Before the poem says anything else, its title has played a trick. "Undertaking" is what an undertaker does, but it is also the plain word for taking on a job. Within five short lines Dave Bonta makes both meanings count: a funeral is a piece of work, and work may be one way of facing death.
The first stanza shows no faces, only costume. "Shoes blacked for the grave" uses a workman's verb. To black a shoe is to rub polish into leather until it shines, and the phrase makes the grave sound like an appointment you dress for. Whose shoes are they? The poem doesn't say. They could belong to the dead, made presentable one last time, or to the person doing the preparing. That uncertainty matters, because by the end the line between those who ready and those who are readied has started to blur. Then come "his white gloves going / up and down." The black and white are the palette of formal mourning, but the gloves also suggest a keyboard or a page of careful bookkeeping. The man himself shrinks to a pronoun and a pair of hands. Gloves exist to keep us from touching, so there is a faint professional coolness here. Yet "up and down" is generous with possibilities. It might be buffing, smoothing a lapel, or lowering a coffin on straps. The words also sound like breathing, the one rhythm of life in an otherwise still scene.
The sound of the stanza carries the same slowness. Apart from "going," every word is a single syllable, so the lines move with a plain, heavy tread: three beats, three beats, then a shorter line of two. That last line feels like something being set down. A soft *g* runs through "grave," "gloves" and "going," tying the objects of the scene together. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letter, so the poem describes a ceremony while declining to put on ceremony itself.
Then comes "but," and the poem turns. "But how the dead have us ready / to love a day's work" is not quite a question and not quite a statement. It reads as an exclamation of wonder that trails off without a full stop. The reversal is neat. All through the first stanza, the living ready the dead, with polished shoes and careful gloves. Now the dead ready us. The phrase "have us ready" echoes the earlier preparation, as though we too have been blacked and buffed for something. What the dead prepare us for is oddly modest: "a day's work." This is the language of wages and ordinary labour, and it is finite. A day is set against the grave's permanence, and the poem suggests that the nearness of death makes that small, limited thing precious.
The word "love" is the surprise. It is the only abstract word in the poem, and it arrives among shoes, gloves and graves. But it was hiding in plain sight, since "gloves" has "love" inside it. The second stanza draws out what the first stanza had already put on the table. The undertaker's careful, impersonal handwork reads, in retrospect, as a kind of tenderness, and the poem hints that any task done attentively might be the same.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It never mentions mourners, tears or any consoling afterlife, and it avoids the usual vocabulary of grief. It finds meaning in a trade most people prefer not to think about, and it treats the funeral director's labour as dignified and even loving. The unfinished final sentence also leaves room for the reader. We are not told what loving a day's work involves. We are only shown a pair of white gloves moving up and down, and left to decide what we would do with our own hands.