And Years Are Slow but Avid Readers

Black-eyed Susans crowd the road
Through the juniper graveyard,
A whole mesa of trees burnt
At one go, decades ago.

The skeletons stand upright,
Mostly, still, ghostly at night,
Severe by brilliant daylight,
As the wildflowers come and go.

Trees with no utility,
Zhuangzi, are more like the carved
Epigraphy of gone kings
In forgotten languages

Than like Taoist immortals.
They’re simply lines, weathering.
Imagine standing human
Deaths in rows in open air,

Vast forests of skeletons
Propped up where their battles were,
Ankle-deep in grassy shrubs.
Once in a while, one topples.

Book of the Dead? You’re joking.
The dead are all libraries;
Libraries are nothing but
Rows on rows of skeletons.

It takes life—it takes desire
To tear a graveyard apart
And haul all the bones away.
Being reads deaths leisurely.