Earth

I don't want to live with this feeling any longer than I have to

But also I don't want you to be gone

So I talk about you all the time

Including the last day you were alive

And I hang your pictures around my house

For me to surprise myself with and cry

Everybody that used to know us seems concerned

But if they knew that when you went through my mind

I'm full of the love that illuminated our house for all those years

And made this dancing child who tears through the days

With a brilliance you would have deepened and sang along with

But you're sleeping out in the yard now

What am I saying

No one is sleeping

You don't even have a dead body anymore it was taken away

I went and wrote a check

And got a cardboard box full of your ashes

And a little plastic bag with your necklace

And I drove back home truly alone

I guess I didn't bury you deep enough

When I poured out your ashes beneath the three witch hazels

That you planted in the yard a few years ago in a triangle for us

Where me and the kid were rolling in the grass the other day

And I saw actual chunks of your bones

Bleached and weathered unerasable

You're still out there in the spring upheaving

Coming out of the ground into air

Is that exact fragment your finger

That once caressed me not that long ago

I still can feel it

And is that other shard a piece of your skull

That once contained the wild brain that used to overflow with loving

Undiscovered and gone

And now just shrapnel remains

Earth

Another place I poured your ashes out

Was on a chair on top of a mountain pointed at the sunset

I went back there last week after years passed

And noticed the chunks of your bones that haven't been blown away

Are indistinguishable from the other pieces of animal bones

Brought there by coyotes vultures and gods

Against my will I felt a little bit of solace creeping in

But I laid there on the moss

Compost and memory

There's nothing else

I can hear wolves in the throne room singing

I will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots

At night I sit and picture myself curled up beneath

Ten feet of water at the bottom of the lake

I imagined trout bumping against me in the low diminished light

Holding my breath trying to be a boulder

Eroding to join you in re mingling with a background

Of churned muck coalescing in the dark

But to get ground back down to matter only

Eternal and dumb becoming not a thing

Abdicating form