Bone

into...

nickels-sortwell house
wiscasset, maine

Bone

When my mother would fall

and break herself, we’d take turns

washing her clothes or making
supper, braising the soup bone the way

my grandmother said to, on the phone

at night, after seven

because it was the cheapest

time to call.  I’d make sure

the potatoes were clean after

they were peeled, and the carrots

too, I’d change the water a few

times and the mud of the last summer

they were in the earth would drift
down the drain.  It would swirl and drift

past my wrists, water up to my

elbows really, the gleam

of the marigold peel, the cream-

white of the potato, their black sprouting

eyes now in the chicken feed bucket

and a thicker, lobbed-off  piece I  had to cut

and squeeze the rot out.  Tell me you won’t be

amazed when, come the early spring,

what we've  thrown out behind the barn

all winter long hasn’t come back and with all that

soaking ammonia, the whole November

to April of the shut-in chickens is pitch-

forked out and dumped, barrow

after barrow, some under-dust drifting up

my nose, or to the doghouse, or some

way on down the driveway where

last week in her cups and in the rain, the car
stalled on the edge of the ditch, the culvert

crumpled with the weight of it all, caved

in like my mother’s mouth after

the stroke, inaccessible, a vice.  I’m

saddest about this in winter, that crimped

culvert, because when I was small I’d scamp

like the cats left outside and get to the middle

under the driveway, before it went out into the dead

frozen ditch again and the broken blond

grass and all the world, all of it, would have

no noise at all, not the sluice, sluice, sluice

of thin carrot peelings or potato too

or the wet slump of it going deep from

the top if there were that January thaw,

down from it all behind the barn,

not the pause (but closest of all to that)

between the tip to the fall and the landing,

the bone still whole, undamaged, quiet

quiet before the impact of it broke

the gates open.  And the scream is the first

thing through, and the skin peeled back,

not the second but close, close to

the bone and going, going, like breathing

out of your nose when your mouth’s clamped

shut refusing, refusing soup, warm

enough to melt the marrow into

the broth we make, the broth we strain

and then take to her, and she pushes, like

trying to catch herself falling, away.