Beneath the grass the bones are stacked like firewood,
the cemetery subdivided, the neighborhood
of the dead grown cramped—femurs touching femurs
in the soil where the worms run through like rumors.
The oldest bones are powder now, the calcium returning
to the earth that lent it, and the slow and patient burning
of the mineral back to mineral—the final transaction,
and the bone orchard collects its rent without a fraction
of sentimentality or grief.
The roots of the old oak have threaded through a rib cage,
the tree ring dating and the human bone engage
in a symbiosis that the living find obscene,
but the dead and vegetation share the scene.
Headstones lean like drunks, the dates eroding in the rain,
and underneath the inscriptions the granite cannot retain,
the bones are doing what the bones were always going to do:
becoming soil, becoming mineral, becoming something new.
Dig deep enough in any old town
and you will find them.
The ones the records forgot.
The bones remember. The dirt remembers.
The rest of us will join them soon enough.