Elk at Tomales Bay

Nimble, preserved together, milkweed-white rears upturned, female tule elk bowed into rustling foxtails. Males muscled over the slopes, jostling mantles, marking terrain. Their antlers clambered wide, steep as the gorges. As they fed, those branches twitched, sensory, delicate, yet when one buck reared squaring to look at us his antlers and his gaze held suddenly motionless. Further out, the skeleton. The tar paper it seemed to lie on was hide. Vertebrae like redwood stumps— an uneven heart-shaped cavern where a coccyx curled to its tip. Ribs fanned open hollow, emptied of organs. In the bushes its skull. Sockets and sinuses, mandible, its few small teeth. All bare now except that fur the red-brown color of a young boy’s head and also of wild iris stalks in winter still clung to the drying scalp. Below the eye’s rim sagged flat as a bicycle tire. The form was sinking away. The skin loosened, becoming other, shedding the mask that hides but must also reveal a creature. Off amid cliffs and hills some unfleshed force roamed free. In the wind, I felt the half-life I watched watch me. Elk, I said, I see you abandon this life, this earth— I stood for a time with the bones.