Dave Bonta's poem opens with a swap that is easy to miss. At a funeral the dead and the living are supposed to be kept apart: one lies still, the others walk behind. But the first couplet blurs them: "a corpse going to the grave / how everybody looks." Without punctuation, the second line can be read two ways. It may describe how everyone looks as they follow the coffin, or it may mean that everybody looks like a corpse going to the grave. The poem never settles the question, and the ambiguity is its central idea. A funeral only makes visible what is always true, that everyone present is on the same road, differing only in how far along they are.
The second couplet turns from this blunt thought to an image: "going up and down / like a tress or vine." The "up and down" could be the line of people moving over uneven ground, heads bobbing, or the coffin rising and falling on shoulders. It could also be the rhythm of ordinary living and breathing. What is surprising is the comparison. A tress is a lock of hair, and a vine is a climbing plant, so both come from the world of growth rather than death. Both are also long, curling and trailing, which fits a procession seen as one winding shape rather than a crowd of separate people. Judging by the imagery, there is tenderness here. A vine clings to what holds it up, and mourners do the same, leaning on each other. The poem draws on life to describe an occasion of death, and that makes the final turn feel more unsettling.
That turn arrives in the last couplet: "into the ash of hands / so weary so long." Ash is the first word that suggests fire, and with it the old phrase "ashes to ashes" from burial services. The poem never says the body was cremated, so the ash seems less a literal event than a destination. The tress and vine are not heading toward a grave so much as dissolving into something. Hands are an apt thing to choose. They carry the coffin, hold other hands and do a lifetime's work, so to see them as ash is to see all that effort wearing away. "So weary so long" can describe the hands, the length of the procession, or the span of a life. Again the poem declines to choose. The repeated "so" slows the line to something like a sigh, and the weariness reads as belonging to the living as much as to the dead. It may even suggest that the grave is a kind of rest, though that is an inference rather than anything the poem states.
The form supports this slowness. There are three couplets, no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation at all. The lines are short, mostly five or six syllables, with the opening line a little longer at seven. Each line works like a single footstep, and each couplet is a pause between steps. "Going" begins both the first and third lines, so the poem is built from participles, from motion that is happening rather than completed. The sounds help too. The long vowels of "grave," "vine," "long" and "so" give the ending an open, drawn-out quality, as if the last line were fading into the distance. With no full stop, the poem never formally ends, and the procession seems to carry on past the edge of the page.
The title is the only place the word "procession" appears. The poem itself never names it and shows it instead, through bodies, hair, vines and hands. Nor does it comfort the reader. There is no heaven, no named person, no weeping, and the dead are simply "a corpse," anonymous and therefore universal. That restraint gives the poem its force. In about thirty words it removes the line between mourner and mourned and leaves the reader inside the procession. It is also a useful example for students of how much work line breaks, missing punctuation and a single ambiguous phrase can do.