Poetry
1st Place, 49th Parallel Poetry Award
The Clear Bones
Luisa A. Igloria
Some say bone was the first kind of paper,
difficult to inscribe because it involved fractures
or accidents. Vellum and parchment came later,
then linen, canvas, reams of book paper. Lifted whole
from the dark ocean bed, a ribcage is an archive.
All the gaps between, the missing years that must be
filled in by hand: at an archaeologist’s pit or artist’s
easel; under laboratory lights or the glow cast by
a tasseled lamp over a séance table. Divination
is the art of reading the future, which is the blue
horizon dissolving like tissue in the distance,
or the level bars that make up a rune in the I Ching.
Early soothsayers threw dice made of astragali—
heel bones of hooved animals like antelope or sheep,
filed down and squared to fit the palm of the hand.
Think of the almond rattling, a little bone sheathed
in its case; a pair of plastic dice rolling onto the flocked
nap of a table, announcing their mystical numerals.
Think of the bookmaker with a baren dried from
cuttlebone, burnishing the spine that promises,
in time, to crack fully open. Mother, every day is still
a gift or curse. The bones steep in salt and water, water
and salt and air. I’ve tasted mouths and tongues and skins
of salt and yet I am no closer to divining their meaning
than the day you called the old bonesetter and her sister
to prophesy. Dressed in the colors and smells of old
tobacco, they lit candles in our living room and scared
the bejesus out of me. They flicked dry nails across
the riverbeds of my palms, crooning as if to someone
already drowned. I’d wanted to go away to the mountains
with a man nine years older, and there sketch pictures
of deer, bats lining the mummy caves, a mountain lake
hidden in blankets of fog. Perhaps I died anyway or perished
in flames I did not smell nor see burning, when I made my way.
Perhaps I floated across a river of warnings into the afterworld,
only to be returned for my desires. Everything I want is still
at arm’s length, a current of blue swirling with
the hint of silver. Shackle and oar, what stains the water?
Nomad, I move from one address to another, pack and carry
my worldly belongings only to unpack them in strange,
new rooms. I’m hurtled back to the beginning. Some nights
the dove of sleep lays its own head on its indigo breast
and cries for release. O Mother, the dream remains,
like window bars, like vertebrae in beveled chains.
Judge's Comments
Carolyne Wright, final judge
"The Clear Bones" stands out among these dozen finalists as the poem of greatest intellectual and aesthetic scope. This poem enacts moments of wonder enabled by a bracing intellectual curiosity, demonstrated here in explorations of relationships between the applied arts (paper-making) and the arts of divination: realms of deep relevance to writers. I read "The Clear Bones" with interest for its interweaving of this cultural lore with the unfolding of the speaker's dramatic situation. The poem contains fascinating scientific and esoteric lore–the various kinds of early paper, the bars that comprise the runes of the I Ching, the dice of ancient soothsayers made from the heel bones of antelope and sheep. In the end, the speaker appeals for release from her wandering among the residues of myth, but the dream persists for her–not quite as a vision of liberation, but as the enigmatically compromised "window bars . . . vertebrae on beveled chains."