Bone is just a sound you make in your throat,
a shaped breath, a word,
till you touch
the smooth massive skull of a feral boar
or balance a pelican’s
almost weightless wing bone
across the palm of your hand.
The blood and roots
that bind us to a place
remain sheer romance,
a grand abstraction,
till you slip the quivering heart from a deer
and fry it for breakfast.
Till you pick chanterelles,
or munch baby carrots
as you thin the rows.
We kill to nourish ourselves
on the light released in death,
for we only know what enters us
through these diaphanous membranes
we call our bodies, these whirls
of wind, rain, mineral, and light.
My mind was an idea about itself
till I found the skull of our mule, Red,
beside a fern-shrouded spring
deep in a tan oak thicket
where he had fallen or laid down to die
almost two years earlier.
The constant rush of spring water
has stripped his skull to a dazzling white,
startling among all that green,
the clear water swirling in the brain cavity,
pouring through the sinuses and eye sockets.
After a meandering sluice down the long ravine
the spring water joins the Wheatfield Fork of the Gualala,
then the main stem at the end of the ridge,
and finally slides into the Pacific.
May it take millennia of rain to wear away our bones,
centuries of slow, voluptuous letting go.