The Dragon of Spears

The bones of the world are scalloped
Curves bending against gravity,
Cut by all weathers, delicious
Elaborations in the mind

Of the horizontal forest
Incompletely covering them,
Their crumbling, stoic resistance
And beds of lives barren of trees,

Slopes prone to hold snows until ice
Builds for them to throw, crush, and feed
Things whose branches reach toward them,
Whose scurrying quarries their rocks

In the wake of the cycling clouds
That have everything and nothing
To do with the breathing of leaves
That so want to forgive themselves

For being alive, aspiring,
Aware of their own tiny greeds
That nibble at the spines of stone,
Bone spears too beautiful to bear.