Gathering the Bones Together
Gregory Orr

     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.