You find them alone, solitary: the desert bones. Without connection or trail. Random as if even in rain
or spring snow they died of thirst. With swollen
tongue, you bend to lift them from thistle, bluestem, juniper or ponderosa duff, the way you might
lift the beautiful companion from slumber
after love. When you coil back to your own shape you are less agile, as if fluidity has fled, displaced by
increase in brittleness.
Inventoried, notated, summed, torqued into differentials, refracted through equations of warped light
or simple dark,
beyond all winnowed shade, you almost remember, as if nothing has been lost, an imprint
of honeycombed marrow against dried
lips, red taste of pulse, of breath-shared, the flood through the infinitesimal membrane between
our mortal and common, though unshared, skins.