Eulogy

That evening

when the bodies of the vultures are memories torn apart—

one draining in the ditch, the other festering on the asphalt, a row of matted feathers pointing feebly to the stars—I open the door and you tell me

the story of their deaths.

A man in a truck, with tires as high as your Camry, is coming toward you in the opposite lane; as he passes he is accelerating. There is a mad smile on his face. You watch as he starts laughing. And then as he drives even faster. In your review mirror feathered bodies soar—one, two, up, apart—thudding heavy

to the ground.

In the morning, however,

the vultures had danced

a bloody eulogy of iridescently arched necks and urgent beaks scavenging

flesh so mangled, wet, and black, it wasn't until I saw a hoof that I knew the dead one by its name.

And in the morning I watched as they became three stones.

Downy texture and sparkling viscera dissolving into form.

As distant shapes plundered themselves hungry
straight through a third. And sang together in chorus—
with the insects teeming under their claws and the flies swarming about their beaks—
the cornucopia of another day.