| | | | My Skeleton My skeleton,
you who once ached
with your own growing larger
are now,
each year
imperceptibly smaller,
lighter,
absorbed by your own
concentration.
When I danced,
you danced.
When you broke,
I.
And so it was lying down,
walking,
climbing the tiring stairs.
Your jaws. My bread.
Someday you,
what is left of you,
will be flensed of this marriage.
Angular wristbone,
cracked harp of ribcage,
blunt of heel,
opened bowl of the skull,
twin platters of pelvis--
each of you will leave me behind,
at last serene.
What did I know of your days,
your nights,
I who held you all my life
inside my hands
and thought they were empty?
You who held me all my life
inside your hands
as a new mother holds
her own unblanketed child,
not thinking at all. Copyright © 2013 by Jane Hirshfield. Used with permission of the author. |
| About This Poem "Where the self begins and ends, what it is and isn't, is a question that's long been with me. There's no objective measuring stick for metaphysical ponderings, but I've come to prefer thoughts that calibrate toward both realism and tenderness--toward life's bite but also its dearness. I've also come to like poems with facts in them. Bone does, quite factually, reabsorb into the body as the growing pains of childhood turn into the diminishing bone mass that marks its other end. Self returns to non-self. But in between, neither quite one or the other, the skeleton is there, almost always ignored and invisible, every step and breath of the way." --Jane Hirshfield |
| | Most Recent Book by Hirshfield 
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)
|
| Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive. |
| | |  Jane Hirshfield is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Come, Thief (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in the Bay area.
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| Related Poems by Natalie Diaz by Walt Whitman by Jen Tynes |
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