Danse Fantastique

The half-moon has emptied almost completely
Its horn ladle of dark,
When a moon-eyed owl casts up
                                             this weird litter.


Read in it,
               A good night's hunt.
Though there is more we want
The scattered remnants to say,
                                          think us lucky to learn
The name of every disarticulated piece.


            Spy
On the stained and gilded relics
Through a hand lens whose frame suggests
Ilium and aperture of
The pelvic cradle:

Long bones' strong oars row close —
                                               shark-finned
Humerus and femur,
Twin wands of the radius and ulna,
Tibia and fibula's welded buckle and pipe.


Each seeks its partner
                               lost
In the jumble.
Here, a scapula's translucent wing;
and here, rib slivers' silver shower.
Everywhere, star-spiked
                                 segments of spine,
realign in their new translation.


A mandible's unhinged scythe
                                         waves

In welcome beneath the skull's
domino mask.



The Bones of the Saints

Most days, we forget
the nineteen bones of the hand,
twenty-six of the foot,
twenty-eight in the masonry of the skull.  Articulate,

you hold our bodies
together, though you play dumb in matters
of the soul; finding it easier
to speak the jargon
of hardware, of the building trades.

Most at home with hinge-, saddle-,
gliding-, pivot-, ball-and-socket
joints; with beveled margins
and moldings' dentiled edges.  Good ones,
perhaps we don't thank you enough.

After all, your donkey-work is what
hauled Catherine up the ladder of hurt
toward her shining wheel of praise.
At some time, many would parade
St. Anthony's jaw in its glass-faced,

jeweled monstrance up and down
the cobbled streets of Padua.  And the little
finger of St. Adalbert of Prague, swallowed
by a fish, was reported — long after it was severed —
to have simmered like a votive candle

in the dark gutter of the creature's
bowel.  Even St. James the Dismembered,
after his death, remembered, at last,
to offer solace, to speak tenderly to his severed toes.



The Greeting

      ...Tom,
I call your name
inside the room
that is this poem.

The answer is the same
as on that otherwise tame
Saturday when I came home,
opened the door and entered the front room.

Your parked car said you should be home.
Playful, at first, my voice starts to climb
as the greeting bounces from
the walls in every room.

A silence so loud and much the same
as the void of sound that rents a room
and lodges, boarder there from this time
into forever, in its tomb.

Ekleksographia:
Wave Two

November, 2009

Poems

Pamela Gross

Pamela Gross is a native of Seattle. Her first poetry collection, Birds of the Night Sky/Stars of the Field, was published by University of Georgia Press as a winner in their Contemporary American Poets Series. Most recently her poems have appeared in the anthology, A Poet's Guide to the Birds, edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, from Anhinga Press; as well as in JAMA (The Journal of The American Medical Association) and THE JOURNAL. "The Greeting" is part of a newly completed manuscript, From the Garden of Stolen Portraits.