Carry my dead body.

If you would sing a song made there.

Unpretentous. Childlike.

Collect ten or twenty thousand dead bees. And in the pit in which you place my corpse. Cover me with these.

I didn’t come from the world or for the world.
I died long before I was here.

This is my little ghost, and his favorite theater.
In which my eyes are wings and my hands hold water.

Cover me with these.

And if perchance we shall not meet, here, nor everafter. I grant you full embodiment, entitlement, and privilege.

I was your own hands, once.
I saw with your eyes.

And remember your parents and the animals you loved. Their temple was my human heart.

My pulse is of the sun and moon.

I whisper secret names when I fall to death’s sleep. In my dreams you come to life and we adventure. Rescuing the future’s prisoners, embracing with joy.

The starry sky our shared blanket.
After my birth the world ended.

But a hundred million bison became my skin. The eyes of a thousand deer are my breathing.

Where a bird-wing’s pulse lifted us skyward.
There, I say, we are together.