It was first dark when the plow turned it up. <br />Unsown, it came fleshless, mud-ruddled, nothing <br />but itself, the tendon's bored eye threading <br />a ponderous needle. And yet the pocked fist <br />of one end dared what was undone <br />in the strewing, defied the mouth of the hound <br />that dropped it. <br />The whippoorwill began <br />again its dusk-borne mourning. I had never <br />seen what urgent wing disembodied <br />the voice, would fail to recognize its broken <br />shell or shadow or its feathers strewn <br />before me. As if afraid of forgetting, <br />it repeated itself, mindlessly certain. <br /> Here. <br />I threw the bone toward that incessant claiming, <br />and watched it turned by rote, end over end over end.<br /><br />Claudia Emerson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/bone/
