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.
drycrikjournal 