NOT YOUR BONES
by Steve Klepetar
we have climbed the long stair
with a sack on our backs:
the crushing precedence
of more illustrious bones.
- Neruda
It’s not your bones I carry father,
from the burning wreck of Troy,
not the weight of your skeletal
frame or crackling wires of your
nerves. It’s not the thin canals
of artery and vein I haul over
these stones, cutting my feet,
straining the tendons of my heel.
It’s not even the memory of your
face, clouded in photographs,
bewildered by this new country
where cities have a thousand
names. Here in my hands I hold
your eyes, each one a green marble
burnt into my palms like some
Masonic sign, something carved
into the podium when you lectured,
swaying backward and forward
so that every other word was lost,
flung back into your history,
heaped on the pyre to burn with the rest.
Gyroscope Review - !17