III.
Then decomposition. The moment
when the sagebrush just above your body
casts its shadow, and the shadow burrows
through your clumps of branded fabric,
through your flattened limbs drained
of muscles, cartilage. Day and night
carry out their cycles, render everything
stagnant. The scene begs for a wake
of buzzards, for their clichéd hovering,
their descent on the blackened bones
and bile, and their methodic picking
of the heart in its ultimate metaphorical
condition. But not every death translates
into a preconceived notion of what death is,
and instead, your body merely lies there,
secreting its tissue back inside itself;
no passing tumbleweeds to offer this image
a sense of closure, or to add a symbolic
element beyond the elements of exposure –
how your flesh coagulates into an object
patrolmen stumble on, photograph, haul out
and leave, with a numbered tag hanging
from your toes, on a cold, steel table.
VIII.
As dawn unscales the last scabs of darkness, miles
upon half-lucid miles of saguaro appear before you,
each with a handful of severed doll heads hanging
from their arms. You move through this forest, study
their faces, the porcelain chipped, cracked, and faded,
deprived of the manufactured-painted lips that once
made it easy to mouth speeches to their jaws. You look down,
notice pieces of your unemployed flesh slipping along
your bones, and when chunks of your thighs and calves
reach the ground, scuttle and hide in the nearest hole,
you begin scooping the scalped and earless skulls,
the tiny suits and dresses, the shoes that drift like flower
petals from your hands, as you descend into a valley
of powdered carcasses, knotted hides, horns and pelvises,
and spinal columns the earth, for reasons you’ll never know,
has kept perfectly intact.
Esteban Rodríguez holds an MFA from the University of Texas Pan-American. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New England Review, and Water~Stone Review. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Image courtesy of Bill Dickinson