It sits in tall weeds
like a crushed, jagged brain.

No beat or synapse pulses
where it sits behind the shed.

All is unnaturally calm the way
operating rooms are after everything

has been tried, the surgeon has backed
away and removed her mask, nurses

disconnect all life-sustaining devices,
all silent except for the clanking of tools

being placed on trays and wheeled away.
Soon the patient is lifted onto a gurney

to be awaited by mourners, those for whom
the body is all they have and so they can't let 

it go. No yet. So now he has wheeled this corpse
into the waving September grass to await eternity.

Only a few birds have cared to mourn. Tree limbs
lean down to caress hollowed-out eyes

which gaze out unseeing into darkening prairie,
where wind and sky collide time after time.

Before a raucous crowd of jays. 




Thomas Reynolds is an associate English professor at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, and has published poems in various print and online journals, including New Delta Review, Alabama Literary Review, Aethlon-The Journal of Sport Literature, The MacGuffin, Flint Hills Review, and Prairie Poetry. Woodley Press of Washburn University published his poetry collection Ghost Town Almanac in 2008. His chapbook The Kansas Hermit Poems will be published by in September 2013. His work has been nominated for a Pushcard Prize.