Veracity

Veracity

Under a searing sky
it is impossible to hide.

There is no artifice, here
when winds have blown away
the final remnants of your skin,
your flesh.

Sinews stayed but finally gave way
beneath the beaks of buzzards.
Blinding sun bled into night-

like mercy- and the maw of
one famished coyote took away
your final piece of heart.

Renounce your body. It
is nothing, was nothing.
You are now part of the updraft,
of the sagebrush on the rising air,
one with the horizon
and the vast expanse of West.

You are greater now than
the mere sum of all your parts- for only
pith and bedrock survive
and that which is tenacious.
Everything but bone is stripped
and silent,

sacrificed to landscape.
Certainty, only.

That is left.