Bruce Snider
Two POEMS
Sky Burial
CHOSEN BY THREE QUARTERS OF TIBETANS —LEE ZACHARIAS, “BUZZARDS”
Birds have come for the body
anointed in myrrh that looks up
wide-eyed, arms and hands
hacked from the torso. Nearby,
a weeping family prays while
others call skyward to the circle
of vultures. One by one, the birds
drop, begin with cheeks, belly,
the softest meat, digging their
tapered beaks, quick jabs, stripping
skull, pelvis, tender spots at
the back of the knee. One pushes
through the ribcage to become,
for a moment, the heart
it devoured. Another grasps femurs,
swoops to crack them against rocks,
releases the honey-combed marrow.
What’s left travels their long
throats to join the small goat
the birds ate earlier, join the spring
grasses that fed the goat, the rains
and creeks that fed the grasses and now
the birds’ coursing blood. Sated,
they stagger and leap, sudden
as they have come, a storm of hunched
wraiths defecating on their own
legs, corrosive feces seeding
the clouds, the rain of heat, dust.
And the body begins to dream
itself into wings to become
the black feathers, become air lifting
the black feathers, the birds, the dead
goat into the heavens.
And the men who have prepared
the body stand below and watch
near juniper fires, doing what
the living do—singing and mixing
left-over bone with roasted
barley flour, yak butter and lard,
praying and wooing, coaxing
back the clawed angels: Come eat.
One Day, He Said, I’d Carry On the Family Name
I know my father’s stooped back
is my back, my lungs filling
with his breath like ground
cisterns collecting water deep
below the frost line. Each night
I pull off shoes, unlace
the creak of him from my ankles.
What in me, I wonder, is me
as the world goes on copying itself—
black seeds sprouting green,
egg sacks on the gray spider.
I walk to where iron gates open
to the corner graveyard and
the stones say: Snider, Snider, Snider.
Bruce Snider is the author of two poetry collections, Paradise, Indiana and The Year We Studied Women. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry 2012. He is an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco.