What the hell? I'll name this something other than the date

Skeletons

Think of the rib cage.
Think of the lobster
clacking inside its trap.
--Albert Goldbarth

1.
We find them everywhere
scattered throughout our houses,
below the front porch light,
on the window sills—
these exoskeletons of bugs
who shed their lives,
but leave their shells to litter.

As a child, I found locust shells
clinging to the sides of trees,
studied the gross bodies,
the filaments of legs,
grotesque shapes of hair? eye?
antennae? They float

through dreams and land
in our hands, so delicate
we could crush them.
So we crush them.

2.
When you find a skeleton,
you must always assume it could be human.
But she doesn’t want to listen,
insists it’s dog or cow—a rib cage,
half of it, curling up out of the ground,
grown there like a morbid ivy,
and now we cannot find it.

I question my daughter about the route
they took the day they ditched
school to hang out in the park
until time to walk back, catch
the bus, begin pretending.
It was here, she is saying.

But here there is nothing
but prairie grass and trash.
Were there trees around it?
Maybe one, and we found it
in a ditch--half the rib cage intact!
It had been there less than a month ago.
But not now, and now I’ve scared her
with all this talk of human remains
and foul play. She’s ready to go home.

In her mind it’s no longer a cow.
But some poor child abducted
from its mother. My son
just wants to go play. But I am dead
set on finding this rib cage.

I wander over the lot,
peer in the ditches,
stare down the ravine,
until I find it. But they have scattered—
my children and the bones
across the grass—vertebrae,
one rib, a femur—as best I can tell.

And now it looks human to me.
My kids pouting, each for different reasons
have come to stare at the bones with me.
We argue about the kinds of bones
and what it all means. They insist
the vertebrae are much too big
and must be cow or deer.
We finger our spines
trying to detect our own
human circumference.

I don’t know.

Then we glare at the femur
and think it’s much too short for anything
human. So, satisfied, we give up.

We go to the playground to play.
On the way, we find the imprint
of an ancient sea creature pressed
into the sidewalk, which we step over.
We race to the tusks of a plastic mammoth.
And there, we hang.