The Organization of Bones
by Joel Long
Let’s rearrange the bones by size
while the goat looks on. Let’s line
them up to cardinal points so
shadow tells the time. The double
doors may open for me to look over
your brown shoulder, your dark hair
that covers your skull where
the rivers are falling and the trees
are green with birds. Start with the bones of the ear,
small sand, then move to the tarsals,
these glyphs made for waving the hand,
the hinge in the dark circuit of the blood,
but here they are soldiers at May Day,
such precision, such a proud song. The goat
begins to hum and nibbles the threshold,
fur bristling like vellum before the monk
takes out the blade. The warmth of your body
is so quaint against the arrangement you’ve made,
a relic of what you are, the past so filled with
warm bodies and singing goats, a thousand
setting suns indifferent to the coming night.
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I was moved by Salgado's photo, Children Playing with Animal
Bones, Brazil, 1983, the three children in their own bodies rearranging the bones into symmetrical lines, making sense of the bones in some way. Of course, the light in the photograph is beautiful in its arrangement as well. With any ekphrastic poem like this, I hope to find release from the artistic image so that the poem finds its own voice tinged with the atmosphere of the trigger artwork.
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JOEL LONG'S book of essays Watershed is forthcoming from Green Writers Press. His book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance (2012) and Knowing Time by Light (2010) were published by Blaine Creek Press. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published from Elik Press. His poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Ocean State Review, Sports Literate, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, Rhino, Bitter Oleander, Massachusetts Review, Terrain, and Water-Stone Review, among others. He lives in Salt Lake City.