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Bones


While you are asleep on the couch

with our son cupped across your chest

half-moon reflection of you


I creep into the garage

to  steal one of your cigarettes;

it is spring now and in the warm air

I watch the paned stars fizz,

soda bubbles in an aluminum can.


Beside me, I see your shelf of tools and trinkets –

jagged rocks you’ve collected to show

our son when he is big–


the sun-white jaw of some furred animal,

one pointed tooth, that you found

in the woods and saved, He will like to see this

someday.


I imagine our son grown big, in love with

himself, a woman, discovery of hidden things.

I am reminded of his bones


and imagine their beautiful sadness

must mirror my own

as he, little wonder of breath and light

mirrors his father

bones asleep between us.




Athena Pangikas-Miller

levelheaded: Bones

levelheaded: Bones
In “Bones,” there are no acrobatics, no spectacles, no fireworks. After a brief early moment in which she “creep[s] into the garage / to steal one of your cigarettes,” the speaker idles along only to “watch,” “see,” and “imagine” for the remainder of the poem. Even in her imagination, a supposedly limitless creative force, the only action occurs when her son “mirror[s] his father”—which is to say not much action occurs at all. The speaker does not imagine her son growing, but “grown.” He is not imagined loving, but “in love.” The poem is still—stagnant, even—but in this kind of thoughtful, motionlessness observation, chest-crushing ideas have a way of weaseling in and overtaking our thoughts. Thus, “Bones” is not simply a poem about our mortality, but also a poem about the moments in which our awareness of said mortality washes over us, carries our daily blunders away, and replaces them with a kind of pleasant dread.
This wash-over is exactly what happens as the speaker begins to describe a “shelf of tools and trinkets.” While she begins on the “tools and trinkets” themselves, she shifts to something more dangerous: “jagged rocks.” After these “jagged rocks,” we’re made to see death in “the sun-white jaw of some furred animal” and its “one pointed tooth.” The speaker’s gaze is directed by her imagination’s increasingly morbid interest in the brevity of her son’s (and her own) life, culminating in a description of her son as “bones asleep between us.”  
Alone, these thoughts might snowball into despair. They might seem like helpless, purposeless wailing. But here, they are subtly tempered with the understanding that mortality, though guaranteed, is also shared “between us” (emphasis on the “us”). The earlier “you” and “I” become “us” only after the speaker’s son is shown to “mirror” his mother and father, and only after the speaker has imagined her son’s life as it extends beyond her influence. The poem implies that, if life must end, life (as a tongue-in-cheek “little wonder of breath and light”) can also keep going. The poem also begins to understand birth and death as two moments we can all share, as two sublime moments that leapfrog into an indefinite future.
- The Editorslevelheaded: Bones


In “Bones,” there are no acrobatics, no spectacles, no fireworks. After a brief early moment in which she “creep[s] into the garage / to steal one of your cigarettes,” the speaker idles along only to “watch,” “see,” and “imagine” for the remainder of the poem. Even in her imagination, a supposedly limitless creative force, the only action occurs when her son “mirror[s] his father”—which is to say not much action occurs at all. The speaker does not imagine her son growing, but “grown.” He is not imagined loving, but “in love.” The poem is still—stagnant, even—but in this kind of thoughtful, motionlessness observation, chest-crushing ideas have a way of weaseling in and overtaking our thoughts. Thus, “Bones” is not simply a poem about our mortality, but also a poem about the moments in which our awareness of said mortality washes over us, carries our daily blunders away, and replaces them with a kind of pleasant dread.


This wash-over is exactly what happens as the speaker begins to describe a “shelf of tools and trinkets.” While she begins on the “tools and trinkets” themselves, she shifts to something more dangerous: “jagged rocks.” After these “jagged rocks,” we’re made to see death in “the sun-white jaw of some furred animal” and its “one pointed tooth.” The speaker’s gaze is directed by her imagination’s increasingly morbid interest in the brevity of her son’s (and her own) life, culminating in a description of her son as “bones asleep between us.”  


Alone, these thoughts might snowball into despair. They might seem like helpless, purposeless wailing. But here, they are subtly tempered with the understanding that mortality, though guaranteed, is also shared “between us” (emphasis on the “us”). The earlier “you” and “I” become “us” only after the speaker’s son is shown to “mirror” his mother and father, and only after the speaker has imagined her son’s life as it extends beyond her influence. The poem implies that, if life must end, life (as a tongue-in-cheek “little wonder of breath and light”) can also keep going. The poem also begins to understand birth and death as two moments we can all share, as two sublime moments that leapfrog into an indefinite future.



- The Editors



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