... so anyway the bones are small

    for Jim Carroll

…so anyway the bones are small, fan-like, tender in their motion
It’s surprising to consider that dinosaurs evaporated this way
Up into the blue yonder, the branches, the breeze
After so long thundering the earth

What fine legs
A chest you could crush with your thumb
Only the beak betrays an old viciousness
A map left over from a hunger for fleshier times

I’m always sent heart-beating into this mysterious evolution
Beatified and depressed by it depending on the hour of the day

Like now, in the afternoon, with a late winter wind rustling the sunny leaves,
A mower whining over suburban fences, my children still at school,
When belated news of a New York poet dead brings these same impressions to me
And I have no reason clear why such associations fly into the mind

But fly they do

A basketball through a rusted aluminium hoop
Loneliness into a glass of wine
My children’s smiles up into the sunshiny day of dreams
The homeward teeming of the city into something reassuring
A passing train upon its tracks a rattled music from my past
Leaves, wings, death, grace, loss, sky, heart – bones 

- Mark Mordue

* Image sourced from Wikipedia: shows Jim Carroll in New York in 2005.