Back from the Dead in the Elwood Cemetery
A poem by Tim Moran

Back from the Dead in the Elwood Cemetery

Too much water, the widower laments.
The chirt, chirt, chirt of sprinklers
all day hurries her decay.
Tendons and ligaments decompose,
and the smile that he would never forget,
slackjaws from memory. But her bones,
he says out loud to no one,
I want to see her bones, and I’ll be here
when she comes to reclaim them.

The sun-bleached bones of the Pawnee
and the buffalo are gone to the earth.
It’s the femurs and fibulas
of the town’s great grandfathers and their sons
that prevail. Bone patriarchy arranged in PLAT map mosaics,
indifferent to an outsider’s footing.

On granite headstones, water beads in
iridescent pearls, like emancipated tears
from this Gosper County daughter of Eve,
emerging, new from the plains’ garden gate.
Blithe, knowing outcast.
All her bones self-made.

Dirt swirls in her fingertips. Twigs of Macintosh and
Honeycrisp knot her hair.
She of the worm moon, Spring and end of
my long winter. Her jawline, sharp and set,
mesmerizes, too. Turns out, I’ve come back
from the dead, and I can’t cover my love affair,
talking about irrigation, walking among
bones I do not know.

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