who would believe how violin-string
the ulna, how she held it—the stem
of a wine glass about to be filled who
would believe he lived for others but died
for us, became a dangled fish,
necklace strung from a two-sided hook
in the room where they go about
their business of tutorial carving who
would believe they could fall so in love
that they would bed themselves down among
the cartilage and dream of their own bodies
opened up into fields of grazing that
this could be a comfort amid machines
a cure for feeling remanded who will believe
professional resurrectionists vie over plots
of earth where the dead assemble that sometimes
they hear them click their clavicles in the night
—party of bones we’re awful busy trying to tell apart
one halfhearted form from another their enthusiasm
from the tremors of death but which of us can
resurrect voice from such choruses of cadaver
Listen:
dawn lonsinger is pursuing a doctorate at the University of Utah, and is the author of two chapbooks, the linoleum crop (Jeanne Duval Editions) and The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Press). Her poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, New Orleans Review, Sycamore Review, Subtropics and Best New Poets 2010: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers. She, like most living organisms, has a thing for light.
Homepage photograph from the Wellcome Library, London
