It must be a slow news day for the New York Times to devote
so many column inches to ancient Tibetan burial practices --
describing the Buddhist monk stripping the flesh from the bone,
pounding white sticks of shoulder elbow ankle knee into gravel like
the stones beneath my own pale feet.
The way the family huddles nearby not watching.
I wonder how the reporter himself bears the cutting, this sacred
dismemberment while the vultures wait patient with desire.
How full of questions he must seem, this foreign man
with pencil and pad watching as the hammer severs spine from skull.
The monk, he writes, will not discuss the skull cups others take
from here -- "for tea" he admits -- as he flicks his wrist in the sign
for feasting before the gorging begins, before the vultures
take flight, tumescent with the dead, bearing mortal remains
aloft in the way we dream of flight high
above the sloping hills, the farmlands and the rocky cliffs.
Yet suddenly it seems a good way for love to vanish
consumed, raised overhead, remembered
only by that which carries it away.
Later, a monk will drink from someone's ordinary bones
as the sun sets in the burial ground and the stars wheel overhead.
so many column inches to ancient Tibetan burial practices --
describing the Buddhist monk stripping the flesh from the bone,
pounding white sticks of shoulder elbow ankle knee into gravel like
the stones beneath my own pale feet.
The way the family huddles nearby not watching.
I wonder how the reporter himself bears the cutting, this sacred
dismemberment while the vultures wait patient with desire.
How full of questions he must seem, this foreign man
with pencil and pad watching as the hammer severs spine from skull.
The monk, he writes, will not discuss the skull cups others take
from here -- "for tea" he admits -- as he flicks his wrist in the sign
for feasting before the gorging begins, before the vultures
take flight, tumescent with the dead, bearing mortal remains
aloft in the way we dream of flight high
above the sloping hills, the farmlands and the rocky cliffs.
Yet suddenly it seems a good way for love to vanish
consumed, raised overhead, remembered
only by that which carries it away.
Later, a monk will drink from someone's ordinary bones
as the sun sets in the burial ground and the stars wheel overhead.
| sky burial by victoria pynchon r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal summer poetry 2008 more pynchon poetry here |