WILLIE LIN
Sky Burial
Lhasa, Tibet
To wake before noon, to arrive early
at the burial ground, to stand shadowed by
the monastery with its red and white walls joined
like a cross-section of flesh and bone, its layers
and layers folded into the mountain.
Nothing grows higher than the waist:
the ground is constant refusal, can’t be broken, takes what it will.
Flatter still: the 18-meter wide platform pocked with knife-marks, circled
by birds of prey, stiff and dark,
their rawboned wings tracing and retracing
hunger gyres above the splintered bodies.
Their calls lick the thin air and eclipse
the morning’s propositions, the guide saying,
Take oxygen packs, wear layers. Saying,
Don’t be uneasy, no clouds today.
Closer, the abrupt curvature of the necks, the wrinkled pink heads
like fists, and the inscrutable faces that know
their trajectory, know the ritual
begins with incense and blades, and ends
nothing. Ends—
bellies so full on a busy day like today they can’t fly
but hop back up the stony ridge instead.
Someone turns away, another sneaks a photo, the priest delivers
the scheduled violence. No, not violence.
To be underground is to be interred in hell;
they are grateful to have their lives picked clean.
Willie Lin is currently a student at the University of Virginia.