Anniversary.

for Ramon Barnes, 1918-1954

"They have pierced my hands and my feet; they have numbered all my bones." - from the Roman Catholic ritual for Good Friday 

I have numbered all your bones, dear father, buttered your onionskin back as I was told to keep bedsores away; in telling my beads I have fingered each spinal stone as, strangled with scapulars and driven to extremes, you begin to slip away from me for good.

Now, your nectar drained, you, no longer you, are prepared to be fetched and carried to yet another bed. Your ursine frame's diminished down to this: they weigh it in at sixty-seven pounds.

I gather it up like kindling, steal it away from these pastel rooms, these hushed and city voices, take it back into those Iroquoian hills

and forward into these, filled now to overflowing with my other dark children:

Today, a small boy bends with his father in a cellar, intent on sifting the earth below for traces of a presence. He seeks treasure: fossils, utensils, tools; icons and charms; a trove of talismans: he finds instead a moldy old cigar box filled with flints.

I tell my son the lesson of this hour: that these holy relics alone have served to mark the wound of forty winters past: For still, my father, I am stunned, brained by your prized stone battle-axe; your arrowheads lie buried in my breast.