The Song of Dismemberment
Now, the time comes
for me to take myself apart,
bone by bone.
How tiny they are, the toes,
the bones of the feet
that held up such weight!
But the great lengths
of the leg bones, the wide hips—
how was any part of me so strong?
I will be gentle with the gently curving
ribs, the spine— I set each piece down
as softly as a mother.
Lift off the skull, set it aside,
and separate the jaw,
and the bones of the neck.
The last step is this— each hand
taking apart the arm
that leads to the other,
reaching the wrists, and then—
I join my hands together tenderly,
each holding the other, and pause—
I realize how much
I love them,
every piece of them.
Then— twist, pull, clatter.
Each small bone falls to the ground,
scattering like pebbles.
When the wind
whistles through this cave,
listen closely.
This is the song of the body:
lovely, beloved thing—
abandoned, broken thing—
and which is the secret?
That it can’t
be sung back together again,
or that it can?
I don’t have an answer.
all I have is this song—
the endless love
of the music
whistling through my bones.
My notes: The original image for this came from a book I read a long time ago (so long that I’ve probably mashed the actual details up with all sorts of other things), Mircea Eliade’s book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (quite a title, right? it’s an anthropological or sociological book). There was, I think, a report in there of some culture’s initiation for a shaman involving them taking themselves apart, learning the secret names of all the bones in their body, and then putting themselves back together again. I tried to take this as literally as possible, so although this poem may be a bit surreal, my biggest hope is that you will picture this impossible thing as really happening, just as I sat twisting my hands around each other while writing it.
