In the poem, “The Railing/ The Loom,” Jeffrey Pethybridge focuses on the image of hands, and how the tasks hands fulfill play into life and death. The poem begins with the idea that “there is a formula for the earth blackened by the bloody deaths of men; it has a rhythm and a ring.” The formula itself is perhaps less important than that of the ring, which becomes very important to the remainder of the poem. It is a word play referring both the sound ring that goes along with rhythm, but also a wedding ring on “the fat hands of the bride weaving the fiction of the burial shroud,” an act Pethybridge calls a mixture of “heroic dexterity” and “heroic deceit.” Pethybridge envisions these hands upon his brother, typing out a suicide letter and a will, “letters of apology and farewell… letters of law and execution.” He then links the loom upon which the shroud is woven to the poem’s title and further to his brother’s death when he asks if these were “the bride’s fat hands you climbed the bridge’s railing with.”
This poem reverts back to a rather macabre, but fascinating tradition of linking marriage and death. The woman weaving the burial shroud isn’t represented as an old woman. The term bride generally connotes someone young entering a new stage of life. But instead of weaving material for the marriage bed, the bride weaves a funeral shroud, implying that the bride is preparing for union with death rather than life bound to another human, exiting life rather than entering a new stage. Pethybridge envisions his brother’s writing of his final letters as similar to a bridge weaving a shroud, and his ascent of the bridge like the bride’s work on a loom, preparing almost ritually for a deliberate, ceremonious union with death.