gowpen

“When a human body is drained of its broths and filled again with formaldehyde and salts, or unguents and aromatic oils, and pranked up in its holiday best and laid out in a satin-lined airtight stainless steel coffin and stowed in a leakproof concrete vault -- I will know that if no fellow-creatures can pry their way in to do the underdigging and jiggling and earthing over and mating and egg laying and birthing forth, then the most that can come to pass will be centuries-long whithering down to a gowpen of dead dust, and not ever the crawling of new life out of the old, which is what we have for eternity on earth.” Galway Kinnell; The Quick and The Dead; The New Yorker; Dec 25, 2000.