Landscape with Scavengers and Bonelight

All day the ravens shit the buck whitetail

back onto his antlers, the thick arcing tines

graffitied with undigested tendons. Coyote-

dragged, draped in a squawking garment

that rises tattered when redtail-harried —

revealing ribs, links of spine, tongue-clean

sockets — and falls, in patches, back, stitched

with wingsound. A feathered hush. Says you will

go down in the dirt. First the four-leggeds

ferrying your shape across the slough, yipping

nothing resembling a name, large birds then like

lamp-drawn moths, before the six-limbed elders

arrive as one mind, as shifting soil, to polish

what’s left, forsaking only the inedible brain.