They stare into themselves, reliving the sound of the hatchet, the crushing bar, the iron pickaxe. Out of the grove and grave, they lie revealed, stolid as geodes broken in the field. The storm has receded now. The violence ebbs, leaving a shoal of bones thrown in a tangle, smooth and hard with the heft and weight of clubs, in hexagons and accidental angles. Their knurled ends are porous with honeycombs, small cells filled with detritus, blood and loam.
Dark birds pick through the silent, polished tiers of knob and shank and curve.
Prismatic eyes of waxy scorpions glitter and disappear in this wilderness of jackstraw ribs and thighs. A swell of pelvis rises as a wave stilled in its cresting. Ribs curve up like staves. A child meanders among a stand of trees and stoops to pick up an object in the dust, examines it, then gives it to her mother who drops it back to the earth. The ground grows human teeth, and no one bothers to mourn these countless anonymities.