Bone Song

Is this diving in verbal brine an attempt to regain primary speech, the argot of angels, words for the insides of words? What sort of nakedness is necessary to marrow such a wind? This from Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 62:

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The shamans whom Rasmussen interrogated about {the spiritual exercise of seeing one’s own skeleton} gave rather vague answers which the famous explorer sumarizes as follows: “Though no shaman can explain to himself how and why, he can, by the power his brain derives from the supernatural, as it were by thought alone, divest his body of its flesh and blood, so that nothing remains but his bones. And he must then name all the parts of his body, mentioning every single bone by name; and in so doing, he must not use ordinary human speech, but only the special and sacred shaman’s language which he has learned from his instructor. By thus seeing himself naked, altogether freed from the perishable and transient flesh and blood, he consecrates himself, in the sacred tongue of the shamans, to his great task, through that part of his body which will longest withstand the action of the sun, wind, and weather, after he is dead.




BONE SONG

Jan. 5, 2006

This is the darkest song
in the pot, the one which
you have to get through
all the others to sing
through naked bones.
All the world’s oceans
are a drop to its pour
and its breasts swell
just short of its blue nipple.
The one who taught
this song to me came
from the sea on a night
in a dream of the knife
which cut these bones
free of aging gore,
harvesting a whale’s voice
from my pain. My
teacher surged from
the sea’s boneless ire
demanding my skeleton
entire; thus my words
are flapping and loose
on the shores of the
common brogue, of
no use anywhere but
here. Pure vowels round
the place where a skull
once rooted, lost or
tossed to the bottom
of the sea. This song
was ferried from that
dark man’s balls from
orca and sea-elephant
and polar bear, singing
in claws and teeth
so keen the vast polar night
burned with appetite and
desire, aching more pure and
infernal than a man can say
though the words in bone
matters are water enough.
No one can measure this
song’s deeper reaches,
nor survive for long in its
night, unless he first
stroll his bones on the
coldest beach of all,
lucent as a crescent
moon wrinkling the tide,
gleaming with sea-salt and
the glaze of all every
womb he’s harrowed.
The song is a skeleton
walking the lines
which proceed from
the end of all other
songs, calm and creaking
in the hushed polar
night, walking that
permafrost mile
of beach at the
back of my mouth.