The Skeleton
Passed on second hand it cost thirty quid,
the narrow pelvis, short shafts
and smooth sockets
of a young southern man came
in a champagne box with a sliding lid.
The left tibia only just healed
from where, say, a truck going too fast
round a corner flipped him
like the ineluctable coin,
heads a cadaver, tails a broken leg.
Insouciant bones lay in the shallow grave
of my living-room as if thrown
by a fortune teller, butterfly blades,
scattered ribs, feet and hands
fused with wire. The puzzle
of vertebrae strung together,
coral exposed from worn bodies
hard as the cash he got for his
before he’d done with it
but after
he’d paid
for a daughter’s dowry
or the pyre
for his father;
the spines
like pricked ears of animals
listening to a man with a balanced load
straining attachments on muscles
of neck and thighs, leaving tubercles
steep
as the Nilgri hills, before a tendon
going off like a shotgun
left him half-cocked over another’s arm.
And foramina at the sides
through which nerves ran
thick as fingers that trace the dips
and curves while lips chant
the names of his bones like a requiem.
Published in Island, Spring 2002
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