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[pushyouaround.livejournal.com]

And what are they to do with pieces of it that lie in the grass
or waft down afterwards, floating through the atmosphere

like feathers from a featherbed in the tale about the girl
who disappears down a well and returns

in a shower of gold? What to do
with all the minute pieces, the shreds?

The air at times turns violet, the sun neglects
to warm the grainy strip of sand we lie on

waiting to be touched and transformed. And the body
falls apart like hair unloosed, returns element to element,

distills itself. We are only bone and water after all.
Skin covers the gray-tinged grass like the oldest balm

to heal sickness. The air corrupts, dries it
breaks it down into its former life of cells

to join the inert world of soil and leaf.
They say Da Vinci's molecules

still orbit the globe, that the air he breathed,
we breathe today. So that when blood is spilled

when skin rains down on this dry earth, perhaps
somehow, the earth remembers.

Jerusalem bombing, February 1996

~Skin by Susan Dickman