Gathering the Bones Together

for Peter Orr When all the rooms of the house fill with smoke, it’s not enough to say an angel is sleeping on the chimney. 1. a night in the barn The deer carcass hangs from a rafter. Wrapped in blankets, a boy keeps watch from a pile of loose hay. Then he sleeps and dreams about a death that is coming: Inside him, there are small bones scattered in a field among burdocks and dead grass. He will spend his life walking there, gathering the bones together. Pigeons rustle in the eaves. At his feet, the German shepherd snaps its jaws in its sleep. 2 A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. The father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming. 3 I crouch in the corner of my room, staring into the glass well of my hands; far down I see him drowning in air. Outside, leaves shaped like mouths make a black pool under a tree. Snails glide there, little death-swans. 4. smoke Something has covered the chimney and the whole house fills with smoke. I go outside and look up at the roof, but I can’t see anything. I go back inside. Everyone weeps, walking from room to room. Their eyes ache. This smoke turns people into shadows. Even after it is gone and the tears are gone, we will smell it in pillows when we lie down to sleep. 5 He lives in a house of black glass. Sometimes I visit him, and we talk. My father says he is dead, but what does that mean? Last night I found a child sleeping on a nest of bones. He had a red, leaf-shaped scar on his cheek. I lifted him up and carried him with me, though I didn’t know where I was going. 6. the journey Each night, I knelt on a marble slab and scrubbed at the blood. I scrubbed for years and still it was there. But tonight the bones in my feet begin to burn. I stand up and start walking, and the slab appears under my feet with each step, a white road only as long as your body. 7. the distance The winter I was eight, a horse slipped on the ice, breaking its leg. Father took a rifle, a can of gasoline. I stood by the road at dusk and watched the carcass burning in the far pasture. I was twelve when I killed him; I felt my own bones wrench from my body. Now I am twenty-seven and walk beside this river, looking for them. They have become a bridge that arches toward the other shore.