1.

It starts with a dead animal: whenever she finds one

when walking the dogs up in the hills,

Jane puts the carcass in a cage on the roof

in order to bring up the bone-curls and -fractals.

Otherwise she’d have to dig

slantwise through the manglement, it’s best

to leave that to the professionals, the sun

and the maggots, the distant star and the grub inside, it’s best

to put on some music. Best not to listen

for any decibels of little mandibles.

2.

Such an old old problem, what to do with the meat,

you would think by now we could just go poof.

At the industrial park, the crematorium’s warehouse walls

are lined with sheetrock to give the illusion

they will last. Sofa in the viewing room, curtains

on the window on whose other side the human corpse

rides through unfinished space, a slow conveyor

to the oven’s mouth. Stay as long as you want but be

forewarned: grief will be interrupted when the curtain’s closed

while someone checks the progress of the flames.

3.

Sometimes the Oglala left their dead in trees

to make it easier either (a): for the soul to revert to birdstate

or (b): for the wolves to be defeated. Women’s work,

painting the body with vermilion, wrapping it

in a buffalo skin, flesh-side out. Lastly

a bright red blanket renders the scene more picturesque

while the women lament wild and weird.

If he be a brave, nest with him a few buffalo heads

which time has rendered inoffensive; if he be a chief

slay his favorite pony and lay it underneath.

4.

The body’s scaffold possesses such a stringent whiteness

you can easily feel aggrieved at how it’s defiled

by the slackening form.

versus their sterile silence. When Hamlet asks the bones

if he should kill himself, they refuse to render an opinion,

a song that’s lured even children to sing

for five hundred years without minding what it means.

5.

You cannot know when they are finished—no, you just call it

quits

depending on the whiteness you hope to arrive at,

how much stain you’ll put up with

or whether you value these relics simply

for the majestic architecture of mammalian innerstructure

uncannily inputted by evolution’s overmaster,

how often you know you’ll look from your work to the still

some-percentage-flesh adhering to the bone, your eyes

shifting between it and the clock measuring its desiccation.

6.

But first you have to find an old toothbrush

—or failing, demote one still in use—

to scrub off the gristle that clings to the cracks

and rubbery clods that hang by a thread

before boiling them down to a stink: half-cloying,

half-sweet, every drape in the house

forever infected, even far from the bone,

with the scent of the putrid distilled from the earth,

making your fibers all mortally fragrant

with the power and glory, forever, amen.

7.

Back on the roof, the creatures march

in a synchronized procession—first blowflies and flesh flies,

then carrion beetles. The flies are so shiny

yet their young make you shiver,

waggling out of the meat as it’s eaten

by these grubs who are eaten by carrion beetles.

Then the Hymenoptera wasps lay their eggs in the beetles

and also in the larvae of some of the flies,

where they grow inside the meat of the grubs

who are themselves the food of the carrion beetles.

8.

And why the bones, not the heart, since so much is made

of that bloody mitten? To last, it would have to float in a jar

full of poisonous murk that it casts its webs through.

And this is not the body of old anatomy books

whose drawings and colors, dotted lines, little numbers

corresponding to a column of names, all suggest

great logic and beauty, part of which must remain

even after the last calamity. But all this

would molder in wide open air, where only the bones can sing.

Well, them, and the teeth: the bones’ little knives, unsheathed.

9.

Every heart sings a song that’s incomplete

said Plato, until another heart whispers back.

He forgot PS: the song might not be sweet.

Plus, hearts might be what this song likes to eat:

chomp chomp. Yum yum. Its teeth could be black

with rot and you might not want to hear their incomplete

singing even if it’s a song, you might not be so desperate,

maybe you find enough fulfillment in the back

catalogue of your own songs, however incomplete.

Or maybe you find completed songs too goddamned sweet.

10.

The bones will stand next to books by philosophers

and books by poets. Because you might need relief

from all that thinking, might need a pelvis for its holes

to see the sky through. You are not so different

from a coyote or a cougar; maybe you’d have been one

if your mother wore another name. And what but meat

would a cougar read?—better empty the shelves,

fill them with bones. Because the books hold in

what the bones spell out: it won’t be long

before your beauty will have all the time in the world.