On the last day of April, Facebook gives us a new way to react: a care emoji. Yellow generic-person hugs a disembodied heart, perhaps the heart that absence makes fonder. But to older eyes, unless you squint, it looks like someone clutching an open wound.
taking shelter
under my umbrella
mosquito
walking through the churchyard
where people have been buried
in good clothes
I hear the owl again
and do not look
another ash I never noticed
lit up by the sun
its death let in
for so many years
I saw it as an eye
island in the stream
don’t call them Indian graves
these mounds
that once held roots
God or microbes
everywhere you look
undiscovered
salamander
under the lifted rock
that frozen moment
turtleheads
self-consciously closing
my mouth
borer-killed
woodpecker-stripped
white
ashes
left behind
the salamander’s tail
goes on wriggling
drinking alone
among the flowers of evil—
the bees are all dead
I died with the word I on my lips.
It only took a moment,
a slight pause as if for a line-
break or a comma, a panicked thought
or the time required for an 8-ball
to cross the baize. I died,
and the cities I harbor gave way
to squalid refugee camps
where the moon went
through a new phase
of never getting out of bed.
They fed it on thin broth
that tasted like a landlocked sea.
And there I floated like Moses
in my open casket waiting to be
adopted by Mother Earth—
The seven deadly elements fight
like nestlings for our worms.
Death is without end
and therefore never as shapely
as my morning eggs.
Don’t misconstrue the ouroboros:
it’s not consuming but giving birth,
having just crawled out of
its own mouth.
I wake every day of the week thinking
it’s enough to follow
the warm curves of the earth
wherever they lead, though I know
it’s nowhere good.
And each day I dress
as if to the funeral of a blackbird
The highway’s tar
has been bleached by
a winter’s worth of salt,
and in the mid-day sun
it almost shines. I squint
at the shapes on the shoulder—
here the humped corpse
of some salt-lover, there
a fetal curl of flayed tire.
When it died, the porcupine
leaked its fluids onto the snow
like a junker car.
I turn it over
with a stick: no sign
of a wound.
Startled up from the forest floor,
sixteen doves go whistling
into the snow squall.
A few degrees above freezing,
and already the first gnats
have come back to life.
Insects have mastered
the most immaculate lifelessness,
deader than any corpse:
even ice
with its many knives
never gets a chance to grow.
Deflesh them with bone knives.
Let the wolves and ravens deflesh them.
Gather them into skin bags and bury them under the hearth.
Feed them beer.
Dig them up every fall and dance with them.
Dig ditches around them so the uninitiated cannot get too close.
Build mounds over them so the otherworld can ascend and be closer to us.
Organize them by size and type.
Rearrange them into new, mash-up ancestors.
Break them so they will not follow us in our dreams.
Suck out the marrow so their spirits will protect us in our dreams.
Burn them and place them in jars of clay decorated with rows of pits, as from missing teeth.
Erect stones around them in a circle so they will remember us who stand in the light.
Bones aren’t this color.
Their darkness is on the inside,
not the outside.
This is the white of a tunnel
in a paraffin candle
from which the wick has been pulled:
burning isn’t an option,
you have to keep moving to stay ahead
of the cold on its pale horse.