--Wheeler Hall, Berkeley, 1973

 

Arthritis? We pictured a seamstress putting down her needle.

We weren’t prepared for bones in a sack, with fingers sticking out

like the twigs of a pollarded sycamore. A muscular young man bore

 

them in and set them gently in their seat. Two eyes gleamed out

from beneath an overturned nest of sawn-off hair, and the twigs

began to turn the pages of the Norton Anthology

 

with a pencil eraser, stopping at Wordsworth and Keats.

And the bones sang from their dry, puckered mouth,

like buds of lilac opening, releasing the spirit breathed

 

from dead men to their kind, reminding us of where we all

were headed and making us look to the windows where green

shadows numberless promised (liars!) we were not born for death.

 

And after three hours of song, and halting disquisition,

and those gleaming eyes cocked up, attentive to our self-important yawps,

the muscular one returned and carried the bones out.