Bone
It was first dark when the plow turned it up. Unsown, it came fleshless, mud-ruddled, nothing but itself, the tendon's bored eye threading a ponderous needle. And yet the pocked fist of one end dared what was undone in the strewing, defied the mouth of the hound that dropped it. The whippoorwill began again its dusk-borne mourning. I had never seen what urgent wing disembodied the voice, would fail to recognize its broken shell or shadow or its feathers strewn before me. As if afraid of forgetting, it repeated itself, mindlessly certain. Here. I threw the bone toward that incessant claiming, and watched it turned by rote, end over end over end.
From Pinion: An Elegy by Claudia Emerson. Copyright © 2002 by Claudia Emerson. Reproduced with the permission of Louisiana State University Press. All rights reserved.