Circles over terminal slow

Washing The Bones

Today I am rain. I function as sky in sorrow or sky in joy.
I sudden in ways the ground misperceives what affects it.
What carried muscle and hair, sinew and hoof lies fallow
in the marrow of weather-strewn years left too long in the
dead of things. Elkgrass, feralsprout, tattertuft skirl the blood
scrabble where the beast fell. Vultures long since abandoned
these scattered ruins to shadow other circles over terminal slow.

Each of us holds our place. I lift the bones one by one, unassuming
the structure. The sharp grain of calcification reads like a lode
of death. Here thriving was arrested completely, the erosion of life thorough. Water was sent back to sky, as was breath and the back that bore the vertebral link of numberless dawns and dusks that passed without notice. Nearby, chaparral grunts and whatever roots there four-footed keeps camouflage in close alliance.

How have I come to this? Gathering bones in New Mexican
highlands and bearing them homeward in a desperate act of
resurrection, skirting scrubcactus and downwood, red Chama
stucking at my trod, making my way down the draw toward a dirt
road fractured with thundermirror strewn there from nightstorm
and fireclap that passed like black buffalo in the darkness that
stampeded between stumbling heavens and a light sleep.

Thus today I am rain. I remove them one by one,
set them in some order that does not add up to a
known biology, brush and wash the patient bones
with a softness seldom afforded anything beyond
such remote redemption. Yet I do so with humility,
with honor. These are my bones now.
I will wear them in the world.

Joseph Gallo
August 8, 2006