Strange Bones

There were bones everywhere, in the ground, resting on the surface, wedged in the crevices of trees, human bones, animal bones, bones of unimaginable beings, strange bones. So that could be the jawbone of an angel, you said: the spleen-bone, the miter-bone. I didn’t wish to disagree, or not openly, so I walked the length of the park, observing, humming to myself. I did not touch the bones, any bone. Hey, over here, I heard your voice, somewhere behind, but I didn’t turn, didn’t want to know what you’d found, some new heresy. In the distance the man-made lake (a reservoir really, for the distant city) glinted. We could wash the bones, you’d said, earlier, as we breakfasted at the roadside cafe. If there are bones to wash, I’d replied. A fable went with this, but I couldn’t remember it beneath the shadow of the ancient, encircling wall. I’d brought water with me, yes. But not for the baptism of bones. I thought that we’d be here a long time, and I might thirst. Or, more precisely, that my body might thirst, my own bones parched in their body-sleeve, their bone-glove. In the shadow of the wall, crowded with bones, I took a sip—a greedy, lustful sip. Soon it would be time to retrace my steps, to plod back across that bone-field, to resume my conversation with you, with your face, its mask, incandescent, its underlying bone.

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G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021) and feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.  Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University.