The Bone Picker

The Bone Picker

     Every grave holds a reason. 

          –from Asian Figures, trans. by W.S. Merwin

Found objects she says for the hundredth-odd time

As shoppers examine her wares

Standing there staring amazed at the sight

Of the dead things she brings back to life:

Bones sifted like gold from a sludge of decay

Picked to perfection they shine

Like the dreamscapes she makes

In her mind.

But how to enlighten inquisitive souls?

She searches for words to explain

The sweet music that plays when she starts to arrange

The detritus of death into life–

How she coaxes a song from a finch’s slack jaws

A hiss from this snake vertebrae–

So she picks up a jawbone and slays us with this:

Does life imitate art, or art imitate life?

(Either way, I’m buying–)

I cup my deaf ear and my head explodes

With the singing of small split skulls.