break up your fallow ground

In the hot smell of pine and eroding cheapened soil,
I have not forgotten your scent.
Through tall red grasses, my footsteps beat the trail,
eyes on every crook and bend

I found the body of a locust there,
a cracked and black-eyed specimen
long as my hand, thicker than a finger.

Fields drank dry by these, I can hardly think:
a sky black with them.

Blossoms, red, yellow, pink, follow me everywhere
fleeting unwrinkled beauty pressed into journal pages, paper letters
preserved in mold and shades of grey.

My body, blossom-beauty, is covered in hiking bruises
bronzed by the strong sun, a large and hardened welt on my hip
left by Saturday's Honduran bee sting.
The insects here, like Congolese Driver ants, leave nothing untouched;
even the mouse in my small bedroom does its work.

Body of a horse, washed out in the rain
on the rocky road west of La Venta.
It appeared almost alive the first day,
an accidental slip into an awkward position,
the terrible stench the only actor refusing to play its part.
By the second day, returning, I found its carcass merely bone,
devoured by vultures centuries ago.

At the bottom of a muddy well, maybe twenty feet down,
all I could see was bones
teeth for the strung necklace.

Corpse of a man, left by vehicle in the street,
bag of groceries coupled at his side, blood neatly pooled under head.
His face was covered by a child's tee-shirt
shielding us from dead eyes.

No, I have not forgotten your scent,
or the firmness of your youth against the curve of my own,
and though my eyes are open,
I can't say I know the way in which to walk.