Trash

This year’s leaves are last year’s leaves

again. Even the loam breathes.

I believe this and Leonard YoungBear says

in the old days there was no such thing as trash:

Indians camped and left ashes only, or bones,

bits of hide, feathers, mounds of buffalo dung.

What the dogs didn’t eat, coyotes did.

Or wind, snow. Beneath trees and prairie grass

everything from the earth returned. Human life

too, Leonard says, should be like that.

I know, I say, I’m not afraid anymore

of dying. It’s trash

that worries me. Caskets. I keep thinking

of tin cans, foil, yellow rubber raincoats don’t

rot very quick, don’t burn either; bury them

and something spits them back. I’d sooner fall

in the woods, feed the sharp teeth of many hungers

beyond my own. And part of me will swim downstream

in the cold eyeball of a fish next time, my soul

under the wings of a young bird learning to fly.