Consider
the material fact of bones,
cellular stones, composite
of animal matter and minerals:
ossien, lime,
salts of carbonate, phosphate.
Imagine yourself archeologist,
hauling the tools of your strange trade
to the dig site before dawn. Picking precisely at the ground.
Crouching under a murderous sun, poised, history cracked
wide. Your supple, swinging brushes whispering
to the dust, grazing
the gems you uncover, the dull jewels you privately
covet,
like the milk-skinned interior of a muscled thigh.
See yourself ceremoniously reassemble
shards and fragments into something whole,
ready to open up its bare, bleached jaws and speak.
Bone is to skeleton
as word is to syntax.
Imagine yourself raising the dead.
Remember bones, and how they yield, also, the raw material
from which other goods emerge;
glue, for instance,
and gelatin.
Bone meal
offered to the earth, food for mint and tomatoes.
Bone china
ox bones fired and pulverized to ash,
shaped into fine translucent cups and saucers,
which bloom delicate cobalt flora
and snake down
through my family’s slim branches,
a blue-flowered spine
curving towards me,
same frail porcelain lips
kissing my mouth
and my grandmother’s
mother’s.
Bone is abundant. Even
in times of scarcity, there are bones. Especially
in times of scarcity.
The first tools were bone:
blades and arrows
needles and hooks.
Homo Neanderthal caught fish
to make fishbone hooks to catch
more fish.
Houses have bones, beams of steal or wood crouching
beneath dog-eared layers
of time and wallpaper.
And stories.
Stories have bones.
Over the economy of words, a permanent recession has settled, demands
that we tighten our linguistic-belts,
strip
our work to its leanest possible denominator,
Some sort of narrative skeleton onto which
details —the weave of his sweater, the smell of her hair— are hung.
So much vocabulary surrounds
these hard organs,
loose words float between my ribs
and the plates of my skull: cartilage tissue calcium
Osteo fossil vertebrae
spinal cancerous charnel
And phrases:
close
cuts
frozen to the bone
Human bones
call for special attention, as does the collective
they form: the skeleton, the bodily frame.
Armor which cradles
our softest tissues,
the levers and joints which bend to propel us
through space.
Lingering too long upon
bare bones,
exposed whiteness,
I become nervous,
think: splinter
shatter. I fret—
they’re so darn vulnerable, at the mercy
of roving malignancies, bad cells.
Cancerous conquistadors sail
the streams of our blood, plant
their pirate flags into pearled shores.
No wonder we fear.
Halloween skeletons rattle their way
into the mute corners of our dreams.
Waking, we drink ritual glasses
of milk to ward off that advancing evil,
time,
waiting to turn our bones to porous
moon rock.
I think about bones surfacing, ivory flowers
pushing through dark caverns, out
toward the light.
Trauma: fractures and breaks.
The possibility of accidents (and darker dangers)
always crouching.
(Self) Starvation: the product of lean seasons.
That which envelops bones wears thin,
as seats of old trousers.
Skeletons shed flesh
as trees drop fiery October leaves,
become roughly bound bundles
of dry sticks,
mourning the loss of meat.
Or maybe not.
Maybe giving sly and secret thanks
for the stark neatness of these bones stripped clean.
Death. Death also uncovers bones.
Bit by bit,
being becomes body becomes
corpse becomes carrion becomes carcass
becomes bone.
Insects bleed us slowly into soil.
Birds and animals scrape and scour, carry
soft shreds into the wind. Sun spreads bleaching rays
over what is left. Rain sanctifies. Snow settles, softens
our lines. Or,
set ablaze, we bypass the tango of decomposition.
Fire like time-lapse photography, unraveling
us in one swift motion.