BODY BURNING DETAIL

                  Arms shrunk to seal flippers

                  Charred buttocks thrust skyward

                  They burned for five days.

                                    – Bill Jones (“The Body Burning Detail”)

The tangle of limbs piled

like Bill’s poem from Nam,

oak skeletons and cadavers

turned hard and brittle

ache from drought,

rings parched of memory,

native history become ash

up in smoke. Perhaps my years

personify the tree, allow

empathy for these witnesses

to wild centuries before the West

was tamed, offering acorn meal

and shade for cattle,

ever-tuned to the telepathic

as they chew their cuds.