I hate the way a bone breaks; it sounds too close to a bone breaking—too much like
a chicken leg snapping in a Ziploc and not enough like anything moons or rivers do.
Bicycling home from a party after a heavy rain, I hit a downed branch and went
over the bars.When I hit the street, language kept pedaling along like a savant.
I caught up on the way to the hospital. And for seven weeks, language invited people
into my body with constructions like Sunburn on the bone or Clavicle growing back as teeth.
But my clavicle is my clavicle is my clavicle. And my grandfather’s body,
which can no longer steady him at the top of a ladder, though his mind is still
sharp enough to re-shingle the roof, that body is his body is his body is
a foothold trap clamped shut,where he can only wait for the returning hunter—
there’s no way to know if that’s more or less than his suffering, and I hate that fact
as much as this one: when abone breaks, it breaks. And bullet holes in a T-shirt
look nothing like stars, but they fade away as stars do in the morning,
and they come back and come back and come back, too. I want to believe
stars shine brighter for young Americans whom language will leave tonight
as they try to cough the bullet out. A year is now 1/33 of my life,
and my experience of a year is the only evidence I have that time moves
slower for Great Danes and houseflies—and for the twenty-three-year-old
(a friend of my younger sister) with inoperable cancer, and for his parents,
for whose suffering there are no words.
