but of late the cool, wet ground appeals
(if one is clever enough to avoid the concrete),
save the air, and fertilize the soil to rise again
as Mayflowers in rain, to be nibbled by deer
and fall again to ground and yet another life
as maybe violets or skunk cabbage, almost
as thick in the cycle of things as if you'd never left.
II.
Tibetans call it bya gtor, "bird-scattered."
Wrap me in hides, and lash me to a platform
deep the woods, twenty-feet up, like a fallen
warrior of the plains, let my friends the ravens
and the vultures clean my bones, and not a word, please,
to the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association.
III.
Whatever you do in my declining years,
don't put me in a home, unless it's adjacent
to a golf course where my pals and I can burst
out of hiding in the out-of-bounds weeds to scoop up
the bright new golf balls driven into the blind hollow
and sold by our slower buddies on the next tee.
Some of us were retailers, you see,
and, anyhow, God bless the American Way.
