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Bone Map

Poems

Milkweed Editions

    Fable

    In the forest, the owl releases a boneless cry.
    I know the names of things here
    and I can hold them.
    I hold your hand:
    a matryoshka opening deeper
    until I can hear your bones
    singing into mine,
    and feel the moon

    as it rolls through you
    like a great city before a war
    where it has been night for so long
    that everyone sees
    with their hands,
    and then somewhere in the city
    a newborn animal
    shakes the dust off itself

    and stands, makes
    a thimbleful of sound,
    and a boy standing in the square
    turns toward it,
    and his father, not knowing
    what his hands will be made to do
    to other men,
    places a hand on his head.


    Deer Rub

    Deep in the forest, where no one has gone,
    where rain bloats the black moss and mud,

    a deer is rubbing its forelock and antlers
    against a tree. The velvet that covers the antlers

    unwinds into strips, like bandages.
    The rain scratches at the deer's coat

    as if trying to get inside, washes the antlers
    of blood, like a curator cleaning the bones

    of a saint in the crypt beneath a church
    at the end of a century, when the people

    have begun to think of the bodies
    as truly dead and unraiseable,

    when children have begun to carry knives
    in their pockets. Once the last shred

    of velvet falls to the ground, the deer
    bends to eat it, nearly finished with ritual

    and altar, the tree's side stripped of bark
    while someplace in the world

    a bomb strips away someone's skin.
    The deer's mouth is stained with berries

    of its own blood. Then, the deer is gone
    and the tree left opened, the rain darkening

    red against the hole in the sapwood.
    The storm grows louder and louder

    like a fear. The deer will shed
    its velvet four more times before dying

    of disease; the tree will grow its bark
    again. Each atom in each cell will remember

    the body it had made in this place, this time,
    long after the rain flushes the river

    to flood, long after this morning
    when the country wakes to another war,

    when two people wake in a house
    and do not touch each other.


    Beekeeping

    It begins on the brightest
    afternoon, my body

    held in a corona

    I can taste the sugar
    and the heat of.

    At the edge of the valley
    wild hyacinths,

    violet ones, scythe

    through the shadows,
    through my eye.

    When I reach the hive
    the bees cluster

    on my veil like molecules

    magnified, a code
    to the core of things.

    When I lift a comb

    one bee stings my wrist,
    then another,

    the venom a note,

    a pulse of light
    that rises into a song:

    a tower of spikes

    or a swaying stalk
    of purpling

    blossoms. This must be
    what love is:

    a pain so radiant
    it cuts through all others.


    As the sickle Moon Guts a cloud

    a sickness grows inside the moonlight,
    turns under the mud in the corral
    the horse churns to fever.
    A boy stands at the fence
    and whistles to the horse, clicks
    his tongue, stamps his foot.
    The horse will not come.
    And when it does,
     when the boy offers it hay,
    it bites the center of his palm
    which purples with blood.
    In twenty years, the boy
    will place a shotgun in his mouth
     while his child sleeps.
    Though they cannot be deciphered,
    cannot become lighter,
    all moments will shine
    if you cut them open,
    glisten like entrails in the sun.
     The fever grows deeper
    into itself, tender-rooted flowers
    inside the belly of the horse,
    inside the eye of the boy
    who again tries to feed it the hay,
    gently cups its mouth.


    Märchen

    Lost in the forest one night, we find the body
    of a wolf, its throat torn open,
    the wound a cupful of rippling

    black milk, where maggots curl star-white
    in their glistening darkness.
    The eyes hum with flies, which drone a joy

    in the bones, the brain, wander
    into the labyrinth through the tongue,
    still hanging out in half-howl.

    We keep walking, holding out our hands
    to feel our way through the dark
    as if we could touch as it touches,

    know it as it knows the stars
    that float in the vacuum of its voice,
    that grow brighter and louder

    until it unsays them, takes them
    back. I know first there was light
    to give the void a shape. I know

    what has no beginning cannot end.
    I can hardly see your face out here
    but I can hear you breathing.

    Your voice opens and says
    I think the path is this way,
    floats out, crosses to me

    in a little cloud-boat and is gone—
    Keep talking. How did the story go?
    How dark it was inside the wolf,

    which had begun as a clump
    of darkness inside another wolf.
    Then the child climbed out its belly

    shining, without a name—
    with only a red cap by which to call her
    and the animal guts in her hands.

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Excerpted from Bone Map by Sara Eliza Johnson. Copyright © 2014 Sara Eliza Johnson. Excerpted by permission of Milkweed Editions.
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