Nimble, preserved together,
milkweed-white rears upturned,
female tule elk
bowed into rustling foxtails.
Males muscled over the slopes,
jostling mantles, marking terrain.
Their antlers clambered wide,
steep as the gorges.
As they fed, those branches twitched,
sensory, delicate,
yet when one buck reared
squaring to look at us
his antlers and his gaze
held suddenly motionless.
Further out, the skeleton.
The tar paper it seemed to lie on
was hide.
Vertebrae like redwood stumps —
an uneven heart-shaped cavern
where a coccyx curled to its tip.
Ribs fanned open
hollow, emptied of organs.
In the bushes its skull.
Sockets and sinuses, mandible,
its few small teeth.
All bare now except
that fur the red-brown color
of a young boy’ s head and also
of wild iris stalks in winter
still clung to the drying scalp.
Below the eye’ s rim sagged
flat as a bicycle tire.
The form was sinking away.
The skin loosened, becoming other,
shedding the mask that hides
but must also reveal a creature.
Off amid cliffs and hills
some unfleshed force roamed free.
In the wind, I felt
the half-life I watched watch me.
Elk, I said, I see
you abandon this life, this earth —
I stood for a time with the bones.