Earth

I don't want to live with this feeling any longer than I have to
 But also I don't want you to be gone
 So I talk about you all the time
 Including the last day you were alive
 And I hang your pictures around my house
 For me to surprise myself with and cry
 Everybody that used to know us seems concerned
 But if they knew that when you went through my mind
 I'm full of your love that illuminated our house for all those years
 And made this dancing child who tears through the days
 With a brilliance you would have deepened and sang along with
 But you're sleeping out in the yard now
 What am I saying?
 No one is sleeping
 You don't even have a dead body anymore, it was taken away
 I went and wrote a check
 And got a cardboard box full of your ashes
 And a little plastic bag with your necklace
 And I drove back home truly alone
 I guess I didn't bury you deep enough
 When I poured out your ashes beneath the three witch hazels
 That you planted in the yard a few years ago in a triangle for us
 Where me and the kid were rolling in the grass the other day
 And I saw actual chunks of your bones
 Bleached and weathered, unerasable
 You're still out there in the spring upheaving
 Coming out of the ground into air
 Is that exact fragment your finger
 That once caressed me not that long ago?
 I still can feel it
 And is that other shard a piece of your skull
 That once contained the wild brain that used to overflow with loving?
 Undiscovered and gone
 And now just shrapnel remains:
 ♪
 Earth
 ♪
 Another place I poured your ashes out
 Was on a chair on top of a mountain pointed at the sunset
 I went back there last week after years passed
 And noticed the chunks of your bones that haven't been blown away
 Are indistinguishable from other pieces from animal bones
 Brought there by coyotes, vultures, and gods
 Against my will I felt a little bit of solace creeping in
 But I laid there on the moss
 Compost and memory:
 There's nothing else
 ♪
 I can hear Wolves in the Throne Room singing:
 "I will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots"
 At night I sit and picture myself curled up beneath
 Ten feet of water at the bottom of the lake
 I imagined trout bumping against me in the low diminished light
 Holding my breath trying to be a boulder
 Eroding, to join you in re-mingling with a background
 Of churned muck coalescing in the dark
 But to get ground back down to matter only
 Eternal and dumb becoming not a thing
 Abdicating form