Picture the cloud-hung mountain, shaman’s haven: 
snowy at its peak, and at the base a sunny meadow 
where we wandered so far back in time. Trailing friends 
through summer grasses, slipping past shadow doors 
into a woods, we daubed primary colors in the caves

our hearts became. To paint essential happiness. 
We were learning how to listen, hear 
the deep creeks’ murmur, rumbling the abyss 
we hadn’t even known about. Presuming 
all lives flow one way, assuming we’d prevail, 
 
massage our iffy juncture to full health. Underfoot 
in alders’ half-light, bleached bones peeped out 
from beneath the duff. Decades earlier, a black bear 
came down from the hills to claim a rancher’s steer, 
dragged its carcass to that shady copse to feed.  

I lay the chalk-white, horned & grinning skull among 
grocery sacks, backpacks, bedroll & sloshing cooler. 
Drove it to my garden, hung it on a nail. Much later, 
carried it away again with other pieces from that life 
that broke apart like mushroom spores in leaf litter. 

The ancient thing of bone still hangs wide-eyed,  
shaded by a shed just paces from my elevated beds, 
sentinel to dissolutions fading in the dry air 
of my midlife. All that brought me to it has resolved 
to other issues, currently. What was important 

stays that way, though smaller in proportion 
to what came next, in clusters of epiphany. 
Time’s falling waters wash away the moment’s urgency—
details of now, simplifying, always grading context— 
moving on toward dissolution and retrieval. 

Once we see how being here on earth contorts, 
blows smoke-runes difficult to hold 
in the blinking, stuttering, firefly mind, 
what fallings & takebacks leave us, here.  
Dry as heel marks of the turning season's 
first raindrops on summer dust, we float away from pain 
back toward the fellowship of nothingness.