The Bones Are Singing
By Arthur Ginsberg
At Dover Air Force base, the Corporal
bends to his work with the focus
of a diamond cutter, drapes the bones
in the Stars & Stripes, pins the Purple Heart
to the casket’s satin lining. Bleached bones
that were interred in a rice paddy,
found glinting beneath the starlight
of a summer’s night, come home now after
thirty years, to a daughter not yet born,
when her father was called to war. Leg bones
that carried him into battle, arm bones
that would have cradled her, the perfect
tongue & groove joinery of his spine, scaffold
for the flesh, still straight and unyielding.
bends to his work with the focus
of a diamond cutter, drapes the bones
in the Stars & Stripes, pins the Purple Heart
to the casket’s satin lining. Bleached bones
that were interred in a rice paddy,
found glinting beneath the starlight
of a summer’s night, come home now after
thirty years, to a daughter not yet born,
when her father was called to war. Leg bones
that carried him into battle, arm bones
that would have cradled her, the perfect
tongue & groove joinery of his spine, scaffold
for the flesh, still straight and unyielding.
She arrives to honor him, the last and only time
she will meet her father. In what seems
an audacious act of grief, she curls her hand
around his vertebrae—adoration rising
from the macabre—begins to hum a lullaby
under her breath. Reconstructs in her imagination,
the man from these hallowed bones, the father
she knows only from yellowed photographs,
clad in camouflage, beside a helicopter. The note
found in his foot locker promising her to come home.
And everywhere, in far flung fields & forests,
beneath glaciers and deserts, ancient & contemporary,
the orphaned bones are singing…
Arthur Ginsberg is a neurologist and poet based in Seattle. He has studied poetry at the University of Washington and at Squaw Valley, with Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds and Lucille Clifton. Past work appears in the anthologies Blood and Bone, Beyond Forgetting, and Primary Care from University of Iowa Press, and in numerous poetry journals. He was awarded the William Stafford prize by Madeline De Frees in 2003. He obtained an MFA degree in creative writing from Pacific University in Oregon in 2010, where he studied with Dorianne Laux, Marvin Bell and David St. John. His book The Anatomist was published in the summer of 2013. He teaches a course titled “Brain and the Healing Power of Poetry” in the University of Washington’s Honors program. He is a long-standing reviewer for the Humanities section for the journal Neurology, and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. A second book Brain Works is scheduled for publication in 2019