The beautiful overcast morning outside,
the second morning of fall outside,
is filled with sounds of engines.
A truck rumbles past, around around,
vaccuuming leaf litter up from the asphalt.
A man with an outlawed backpack blower
snarling through the bushes below,
filling my morning with jagged teeth,
gears of noise masticating the morning to bits.
And white perfunctory gasoline smoke that
drifts up into my window, acrid incense.
Reminds me of running the lawn mower
bleary on Saturday mornings in the 70's,
up and down the planar front yard.
Also recalls motorboat engines
on green Michigan lakes in the early 70's —
how they boil the water and make white smoke
and leave paisley petroleum rainbows
chasing in the swirling water.

***

It was awfully nice of ancient things
to die and turn to oil. Millions of years later
they get to participate again in daily life,
getting burnt up in small hellish steel chambers.
Imagine, for comparison, a machine in the future,
powered exclusively by human bones.

***

What dramas might my bones take part in?
Maybe my dry femur will crack the crunching skull
of a post-apocalyptic nuclear mutant in a life-death struggle
over a rancid hunk of food. Perhaps it'll wave from the fist
of a chieftain as he pronounces some important tribal decision.
Maybe it'll be in a velvet reliquary box, me having
done something saintly in my later years. Perhaps a
farmer will turn some of my white ribs up in the crumbly brown
earth of his arable land under the blades of his plow,
and bring them home to his wife, since they have a legend there
that that the old gods and kings of the world were buried
here and there in the earth, and when you find the bones of one,
it's great good luck.
Perhaps my cranium will hold wine
cradled in the big leathery palm of some latter-day giant,
in the door of a new cave. Maybe my grinning skull will crack wise
from an anatomy professor's webby shelves, or from the bookcases of
a crazy old woman fond of collecting crazy old things. Or
perhaps my skull will the the centerpiece of some
elaborate ritual — they'll call it the skull of Shaqunajah Ritoh,
the God of Agriculture. And, heaving and chanting all around,
natives of Civilization 36, in what would be our year
one million three hundred seventy-six thousand eight hundred and
twenty-two.