Earth

(album: Now Only - 2018)

I don't want to live with this feeling any longer than I have to
But also I don't want you to be gone
So I talk about you all the time
Including the last day you were alive
And I hang your pictures around my house
For me to surprise myself with and cry

Everybody that used to know us seems concerned
But if they knew that when you went through my mind
I'm full of the love that illuminated our house for all those years
And made this dancing child who tears through the days
With a brilliance you would have deepened and sang along with
But you're sleeping out in the yard now
What am I saying?
No one is sleeping

You don't even have a dead body anymore
It was taken away
I went and wrote a check
And got a cardboard box full of your ashes
And a little plastic bag with your necklace
And I drove back home truly alone

I guess I didn't bury you deep enough
When I poured out your ashes beneath the three witch hazels
That you planted in the yard a few years ago in a triangle for us
Where me and the kid were rolling in the grass the other day
And I saw actual chunks of your bones

Bleached and weathered, unerasable
You're still out there in the spring upheaving
Coming out of the ground into air
Is that exact fragment your finger
That once caressed me not that long ago?
I still can feel it
And is that other shard a piece of your skull
That once contained the wild brain that used to overflow with loving?
Undiscovered and gone
And now just shrapnel remains:
Earth

Another place I poured your ashes out
Was on a chair on top of a mountain pointed at the sunset
I went back there last week after a year has passed
And noticed the chunks of your bones that haven't been blown away
Are indistinguishable from the other pieces of animal bones
Brought there by coyotes, vultures, and gods
Against my will I felt a little bit of solace creeping in
But I laid there on the moss
Compost and memory:
There's nothing else

I can hear Wolves in the Throne Room singing:
"I will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots"

At night I sit and picture myself curled up beneath
Ten feet of water at the bottom of the lake
I imagined trout bumping against me in the low diminished light
Holding my breath trying to be a boulder
Eroding, to join you in re-mingling with a background
Of churned muck coalescing in the dark
But to get ground back down to matter only
Eternal and dumb becoming not a thing
Abdicating form