Over a hundred years, no doubt, & big
enough to need grinding, left instead to gray
& grow smooth. Someone placed the skull
on the stump’s ringed plate, antlers still
attached in their sockets above the empty
eye holes. Two carcasses going old
together for company. Echo & reminder
of the direction we’re headed & how form
holds to order, skeleton within the tender
leaf or muscle stretched across a frame.
Watching these two page-white bones
fill day by day with fine lines & cracks
feels like reading two different translations
of the same source, the one written
in a language lost long before I came
to this road, this yard, this mulch scattered
over the ribs of roots inside the ground.
From: https://bhreview.org/articles/still-life-with-stump-skull/
Date: 2024
By: Mira Rosenthal (19??- )
From Troubles of The World 