it's no grave matter that
you write fossil poems
underneath
skin-soft facts and
clothey dross giving way
to their own kinds of
mutability.
i want to read your bones,
to boil you down to
stuff found in books
about the past,
check you out of
shelf-death, hard cover
pressing dirty hands like those before.
i want to know you live
and dig down through your whens
to trace behind skeleton pens,
i want to read your bones.