These Bones

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

It seems that I am forever
trying to fall in love with these bones, and the flesh that keeps them hidden away so that they might remain

mostly unspeakable.

This is your story too, if you are

honest about it. Being human.

***

When I was a little girl, my mother dressed

me in brightly colored bathing suits so that

I could be spotted way down the beach;

even then, I had a penchant for wandering.

I bent over sand buckets to identify shells for

delighted old ladies and gentleman, handed

sharks’ teeth to astonished little boys,

but gathered the round, white vertebrae of

ocean-going fish for myself; a wild child seeks

adornment from the sea.

All you need is some string and you

can make a necklace.

And, there have been other bones:

Turtles left to the elements at roadside,

the deer the hunters lost to forest secrets,

dogs piled high at the end of an old road in

the middle of nowhere on a day that I had dedicated

to being charmed by birdsong and birds,

and I have visited museums, many of them,

where bones stare back at you, begging you to

remember a life that you never knew, to

imagine something when it was ensouled

and might have chosen to eat you for being so

close, or it might have run. But, it wouldn’t

have stayed, not like this. Not this still, forever.

These other things are so easy to love, like this

stark day with the sycamores bearing their ribs.

***

They say that poems should have good bones.

Stories can be ligaments and tendons.

***

I wonder what our Mother feels in that moment

when we walk away from her for the very

first time,

and later when she hears us remark:

“I have been abandoned.”

How easily we abandon ourselves

to stories in which we do not belong.

***

Here, on Earth, we live such a story.

Being human.

***

I love all the old stories – the ancient ones –

in which ancestors are more than just bones,

just bones,

especially when the ancestors were not

just human like they are now,

in our way of speaking of

the world as not needing us.

***

Maybe, someone will adorn

themselves with these bones,

my bones.

It could, perhaps,

be me.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"

Published by Talking Waters Press 

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