Every year a little funeral cha-cha
       

The neighborhood grows narrow with the bulk
of our debris, stacked, rain-moistened and decaying,
so that we live in a stench now or for now. Who can say
when this cloud of vegetal death we inhale will lift?
Trees thinned from the storm allow light through
in accidental pantomime of the stroke of autumn
that belongs somewhere else. Somewhere north
where people learn of death seasonally. There loose straw
becomes a reminder, how dolls remind of bodies,
remind of death. Hair the derivative of wheat,
wheat the derivative of bramble, the way I circle
back to steal this wheat-colored hair, steal an apple,
the very golden delicious, the exact delicious one.
We don't grow apples here. We don't orchard.
We grove. We bet heavy on the promise of everlast
and lose it all in one weather event. To name our destruction
is a gesture that quakes in my quick. A wish to externalize
as: a wish to uncover the gnarl inside, to extract ugliness
and let it leaven. To bake and feed it then, to you.
What if I am charcoal, absorbing all that is deadly?
Enter metal. Enter moonlight. What if I am simply flesh?
Enter snowstream. Enter bone. I try to hitch my horse to you.

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Copyright © 2019 Caroline Cabrera All rights reserved
from Bone Bouquet
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission