I haven’t found bones in the forest before (and Hark! take note–) but am left wondering if this is not a place of Death at all, or even substantiation, but something much more mediocre, like: a tired old man feeding an even older and more tiring dog who couldn't even bother to take home his treasure (once he's done with it–) an all too familiar tale, I've found. I've missed Alberta’s long summer days; can’t tell time by using the sun, so I decide not to bother trying at all– the water’s cool but the air is hot and I've no need to hurry home. I get sand in the hummus, but I’ll just eat around it; an eagle flies over my head, lands perched atop a black spruce tree close enough that I inspect them, forgetting words we've learned for impressive and dominant; surprising or divine. It stands there screaming, and I wonder over what; suppose that it might ask the same of me, who claims they've nowhere else to be and yet is certain of an absence. "Are you lonely, too, Eagle–?" in lacking a mate, or perhaps strung up like guts these strands of memory; of other trees and beaches you believe held heaviest, the longing we account for– still more on crops the ones you had imagined once until, well-seasoned you are fit enough for consumption by the ones you've not met and thus have missed the most: Jeff used to tell me I would be alone and that no one else would understand me and I guess that he was right. But I’ve still got to fly so low over the water; I can see what's left fishing for me inside and that it’s hard to say by early evening how things turned out– maybe its children died, or it is realizing that pill we swallowed is perhaps filled by the same renowned poison that's been killing us off; our beaks have grown crooked and our eggshells crack soft; we are the last of our kind and still carried aloft– the winds never noticed our offspring. I don’t know why there is a scream inside of me but am tired of its asking for another answer. Instead, we take relief as it comes between passes, looking as one does for a place to land; on the beach and in its arms– the many-faced Man upon which we pin our endless Hopes and elaborate reveries; that sing: "My Love, for you I pine so bravely– sweet." I’m happier wanting alone on this beach than I am having so little you value to offer; wash the bones in the river and puzzle over what all these joints are– the former, the marrow; the line I could be in resisting the urge to collapse from these burdens; the last thing left over when the rest have discarded the pieces felled flesh declared spoiled demanding we taste what we've ready; digested 'til the answer that movement emerges and to carry consumes us. If I am not to be held to where’s the gristle in merit? I don’t know how to make sense of what must be abandoned. The bones are left over, is what it amounts to– so I’ll bend as I’m walking; slip you into my pocket...sleep as the sun goes; my arm on my face the only shade this burn merits.
