Two days ago it was warm enough to wake the flies. Now
it's snowing, light dusting like powdered sugar
over the gray and brown post-harvest landscape.
A spoonful of sugar, or so they say, though
as the barometer drops there's not enough sweetness
to go around. The blood slows, thickens, settles
into the veins …
geologic sediment
that will, in the later years after my death,
be excavated when the explanations
(eventually) become important. There will be rings
in the bones – evidence of warmth and cold that,
over the years spread to the vital organs:
the heart,
the liver,
the spleen.
The story spun by inexperienced necrophiliac historians
will be one in which they are heroes
and in which the corpse on the slab
is nothing more than an anonymous preamble
to an inevitable greatness they will copiously describe
using strip mine style explanations,
and retrofitted possibilities limited by statistical models
that are inadequate to the taxonomic task
of reconstructing a memory...
because they lack the hieroglyphic key
they themselves destroyed when,
upon finding flies the belly,
they slaughtered them without a second thought.