Beauty and the Bone Dance

(for Tara)

It isn’t for the novelty, nor to bind the injured
sparrows song to mine. Nor to pawn these faces
as sentimental gallstones of the parade’s glare, coins

from the limbo armies crowding the styx. It isn’t the weeks
novelty, spent in a locked crafts room that no longer knows

us, palm impressions without signature; the serration
of your raincoat skin, webbed, wet, your bones

like wood splinters, softer, pressing to
this goal, one white door after another.

I remember the planets in your hand; I asked to touch them
once. Five bulging orbs, loose, staring back like alarms. One
red curl dangling above aquiline cheeks, those dumpling

moons, sudden. The therapy aides’ swan dance, their
laying on of hands, food flying like shrapnel, hunger’s
stubborn seance, the black alchemy of spit bones,

Metamucil and Ensure.

Eat, Tara. Lay down the dance, the bone magic,
the magazines. 16 years old, food truck morning
coffees, the walks. But you fasted for the Godheads
of corporate beauty, feeding them beneath the table.

Before the unfurling dawn of early morning Manhattan,
you skipped an imaginary rope; it was white pink
and cast a shadow, spinning like an electrical toy

come to life. About the shadow: I never saw it, but I
believe it was there. Drooling finger-paints

rifled canvases, this still life where I’ve left you,

colors arched like double barreled moths. One day
a Spanish man who looked like he was catching flies

with his tongue said: “Her heart exploded.” Did
you hear that? I was wondering if you remembered
that day.