---

 Barbara Bowen

Bonesinging Under Concrete:
Elegy for Tse-Whit-Zen Village, Port Angeles, WA

“At nights when the streets of your cities are silent, they will throng with the hosts
that once filled this beautiful land.” from Chief Seattle's response to Governor Stevens

They didn't hear the singing, didn't feel the song
moving underneath their feet. The tires of the yellow-bodied
bulldozers brought in to excavate

the graving yard, clawing their way
into the concrete, knew of neither bones nor singing.
The construction workers didn't hear the singing,

and neither did I. The singing had synchronized
a beat to ancient drum rhythms around a fire.
No one who'd been in the neighborhood

to catch the ferry to Victoria or buy fresh seafood,
heard the bonesinging. The day
my friends and I drove toward the ocean

to honor the bones, that gray, bone-chilling day
when wind froze the rain, we stood in a circle
with chiefs and medicine men, with congressional staff,

with bookkeepers and carpenters.
The bones beneath us singing for sure, their songs
resonating in the earth the way fires

in peat bogs smolder and radiate their heat.
Last night I dreamed of singing bones, their green songs
woke me in the night. Give the land your singing,

they told me, and when a friend started the Songlines
Community choir, I joined, even though I’d been
the one sixth-grader that didn’t make the cut

for the school-wide Spring pageant. We are growing
our songs. We gather and sing the song lines
back to life, we sing call and response to the bones.

—Barbara Bowen

 

Collateral Damage

The boy, nine or ten, looks straight at me from the cover of the Sunday
newspaper magazine. His skin is the color of ripe wheat.

The light from a high window sculpts the curve of his cheek into a shallow
bowl. Both of his bandaged arms end just below the elbow.

I wonder if the boy senses phantom limbs beyond the bandages.
In another time, you might imagine the boy had been overtaken

in a field by a threshing machine as he worked beside his father.
On his abdomen, so small a large hand would cover it,

a burn opens like a mouth. The boy’s dark eyes, wide open, cry out:
I’m here, return my gaze.

I wonder if he senses phantom limbs beyond the bandages.
All day his image impales me.

It takes me hours to fall asleep. I drift out of the day,
into another world. I hear peacocks –

their high-pitched warning cries. The boy appears:
I can help you find water in the desert,

I will help you retrieve your phantom heart.

—Barbara Bowen

 

Notes on Unfolding

In the field just back from the bluff,
under the branches of an old madrona,
an Indian poet unfolds her pink and gold wedding sari,
If I sold this, she tells us, I could live
comfortably in Paris for months.
She passes the cloth to our hands and now
four women are connected by pink and gold,
by silk, by India, by the flavor of mango chutney.
Two women move outward toward the tree
and drape the sari over a low branch.
There is talking, there is sky.
When does unfolding become sky?

Pink sari draped over a branch, my body
draped over your body, all night
we slept like that in the Brooklyn heat. Light erupts
in the cloth, the way sparks explode in the surf
on a summer night--like us, the way we glowed.
The tree, its bark peeling, sloughing its skin,
not in one piece the way a snake sheds,
but patchy, the way we pulled sunburned skin, blistered,
from each other’s backs. Bhanu
places leaves on the pink cloth, something
like a new skin offered to dead branch;
she sings the song for ashes,
retrieving the day her family unfolded her father’s ashes
into the Ganges, preemay, preemay, hamay…
four madrona trunks lean outward from a core that holds
a rotted, insect-eaten stump; the madrona’s ashes,
turn to new soil in the cavity.

The sari moves in the wind,
patterns of light shift, shade moves,
the gold thread reflects the sun. All over town
the madronas are dying;
limb-by-limb they turn black and lose
their leaves, one-by-one. My friend
sawed off the branches of the madrona
outside his shop, finally only a stump,
then a hole in the earth. The sari
hangs over the branch and tongues out onto the earth,
a shroud over the dead limb. My lover’s limbs
are dead. My limbs are dying. Ashes and shoals.

I move from the pink unfolding backward
toward the blue unfolding that hovers
in the room where we slept. There was sweat,
there was talking, There was your voice
making light appear in the mirrors, the arnica oil you sang
into the folds of my skin. Memory waits in the room,
it is blue, it is draped over our bodies, our bodies
entangled and sleeping in the heat. In the dark I see
how points of light appeared in us
as we opened to our many-folded longing.

—Barbara Bowen