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BONES

                                         I.

We walk our dogs through woods still winter-bare
except where dogwoods blaze as white as bone
among old pines and water oaks. This soon
in Spring our hill still hums its hymn of sleep,                                                                

a dense and dampish lullaby to green,
a tune we can’t exactly hear, but feel
as easing in our bones, like sleeping cold
and someone tucks us in. It’s an old

song of the comfort of giving comfort, told
by the wood-burning stove that warmed our bones
five months while the sun backed off, a song
for March’s sparseness where we walk our dogs 

through elms and oaks with no leaves on, past
slants of light like silvered walking sticks.
On such a cleanly beaming morning, is it
any wonder we think our trees are singing?

                                         II.

We pry a deer bone from the hound’s mouth,
a slobbery job, and wedge it high in the crotch
of a sassafras, stashing possible death
where we can see it, but the dogs can’t.

These messy meddlings get to be a habit:
more and more we walk our dogs past
other morning’s purloined bones clacking
in branches like prayer wheels. Lacking 

faith in fate, we let our dogs ramble, then
whistle them back, as if wildness
could be tethered, as if our little forest’s
orders and bounds were set in place by us 

each time we walk these woods, still winter-bare
today except where plums and dogwoods flower
as pink as skin among the oaks and poplars
greening themselves awake with mindless ease.