Writing
bird bones
My husband told me to remember that bones are actually wet
and not the bleached dried things we step over like stones amidst the sagebrush
or encounter in the sterile setting of the museum.
Bones are dense and moist with our own aliveness.
Weighted by more than gravity.
This idea keeps me company as I have watched the finch body
decompose below my kitchen window.
The feathers conceal the disarray of disintegration.
The elfin leg to foot joint looking like a miniature of the wishbone I tugged on
at Thanksgiving with my sister moons ago.
Short stick or long one?
Who knows what tender endings come of our flesh and toil,
our own grapples with gravity.
I do know that I held an injured bird in my hand once.
I had to trap it in the little cave cup of my palm.
It was a magic trick— it’s lightness—
the way it felt like holding softly formed air.
The weight of those bones ineffable as the weight of being.