These, on this pebbly shore,
four white stones beside each other,
narrow and peaceful,
are my fingerbones,
where they came to rest long ago.
There is my clavicle exposed
in the sagebrush root,
welcoming summer and winter alike.
My teeth sparkle in the glass case
of the jewelry store; I don’t mind
no one knows they were mine.
Look, you can see my intricate foot bones
embedded in this old stone,
how they stand out against the gray;
sacrum and ilium scooped out of the glacier;
femur and fibula fallen on the forest floor,
generously giving themselves
to moss and fungus and burrowing moles;
ladder of my ribs in the snow-laden branches
of the white pine, no longer needing to guard my heart;
and there in the stream a bed of my skulls,
no longer thinking so hard as the water flows over them.
That wisp of cloud passing overhead
is my breath of eons ago.
I see these things with eyes that are oceans,
through trees and rivers of nerves,
momentarily assembled from the chalk cliffs,
I, the bones of God.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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