How to Feel Your Own Bones

 How to Feel Your Own Bones

Somewhere below the surface of a January grave,

My history rests just fine until a man returned to lure me

 from the wood only to find he could not find my heart.

Finding bones instead, he laughed, 

gathered them into the night --- 

a filtered green tradition. 

Think poets and their everlasting labels.

The river man,

Earthen, viney and tough, he 

stole the bones of my history, 

but he did not steal my heart. 

How filtered you are, he whispered.

No one can reconstruct a heart 

from its history. Go and find my heart. 

When you return --- well, go and find 

what you will find.

Like time and bad weather, fear passes. 

Oranges are gathered. A hypnotic roll of tickets 

distributed and taken, tear themselves in half 

and flutter to the ground.

Rained upon, snowed under, bleached and buried.

 Graves turn. Blue stones erupt into gardens 

new laid. My heart lies somewhere. 

Here. On a page I cannot read.

He is a poet and has resurrected me 

in words cleverly edited to bones

and a twinkle.

See, the problem is he found my heart 

between sheets of white and has fallen in love 

with it there. Why not? It’s so clean 

and he can rest, as once I could rest.

No more. I haunt myself with itching

 and burials as scattered as the tickets

 the trees leave. No passage here.

Far away by now, he remembers fondly, 

profitably, everything love taught him.

The bastard.