A title like "Employment" promises a résumé, and the first line seems to oblige. "I had some experience" is the modest, slightly guarded phrase of someone at a job interview, with the past tense suggesting it is all behind them. The second line breaks that politeness. Experience is measured not in years or positions but in "the breadth of the whole meadow," a unit of space, open and green and nothing like an office. The speaker's qualifications turn out to be the world itself.
The second couplet moves from that wide field to something small and final. "We were all kin at the burial" is a quiet, startling claim. A funeral is where kinship is usually sorted out, with the family in front and everyone else behind. Here the distinctions drop away and "all" are relatives. The poem never says who "we" are, but the meadow in the previous line makes it tempting, and I think legitimate, to wonder whether the circle reaches past people. The final line, "my hole my hand my feet," suggests that the real work of the title is dealing with death, either by digging a grave or by being the body that ends up in one. Both readings fit, and the poem doesn't choose.
The construction is spare. There are four lines in two couplets, no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letters apart from the lone "I." The absence of punctuation matters most in the last line. Written out normally, it would be a list with commas, but without them the three phrases press together, and the reader has to decide where to breathe. The line contains no verb at all, only possessions: my hole, my hand, my feet. Its rhythm is blunt, with three heavy beats and monosyllables throughout, so it sounds like a tally or a slow walk. The second line has no main verb either. It simply hangs from "experience" like a larger thing attached to a smaller one. The poem's whole grammar is of things set side by side, not explained.
The sharpest detail is a sound. "Whole" in the second line and "hole" in the fourth are homophones, and the poem places them at the same position in their couplets, so they almost answer each other across the gap. The meadow is whole, complete and unbroken, and the grave is the hole cut into it. The poem has no rhyme in the usual sense, but this echo works as a rhyme of meaning, a reminder that every wholeness contains the possibility of its own opening. The pun also loosens the word "hole." Placed between "hand" and "feet," it reads as one more body part, as though the speaker's grave were an organ they had always carried. It could be the hole they dug, the one they will lie in, or both, and "my" claims ownership of it either way.
Even the word "kin" is worth a look. It is short, old, and plain, without the Latinate softness of "relatives." Next to "burial" it sounds earthy and almost agricultural, a word for people who share soil. That fits the poem's quiet suggestion that its employment is not a career but a condition, being alive among others who will also be put in the ground.
The poem is significant for how much it asks of so little. It takes the vocabulary of work, with its "experience" and its title, and shows that the largest jobs in life, such as belonging to a family, a place, and a mortal body, never appear on a résumé. It does this with no argument and no sentimentality, only a field, a funeral, and a short list of body parts. A poem this brief leaves most of the thinking to the reader, and that may be its final joke about employment: to make sense of it, you have to put in the work yourself.