Song Body Farm

Dolly Parton, Junior Kimbrough,
And Maurice Ravel took their turns
In one rotation for a spell.

Mother Goose’s fairy garden
Done got old but found a new home
In the sun. And then they were one,

As in, all sunk in the same skull,
Seasoning and altering them
With all its other musical

Names, tales, and recorded voices,
Compacting like stream sediments
Unlikely to last as sandstone,

More likely all lost with the skull,
The forms as that skull compressed them.
What a strange acceleration

Of the decay of the wide world
Was the decay in the living
Brain, from fresh experiences

To heaped detritus, to fossils,
To stone, all in one lifetime’s days,
Gone while the tunes beyond still played.