Breathing with Bones

I am out walking among the larches. A cloud passes over the sun. I pause, and it is now that I see the mouth on the ground—wide and white and open. The mouth is crowded with long gray teeth. Rows of ragged tubes with smaller mouths inside each one. Mouths shrunken like squinting eyes. The jaws of the mouth are frayed and full of holes, and so I know the mouth is very old. It has been on this ground for a very long time. I kneel on the earth and put my ear close to this mouth of mouths, and all the little mouths inside the big mouth say, Lay down, come lay down and breathe with us.

I lay down with the mouths and we all breathe for a while, not saying anything, and I feel the arcs of my ribs lifting inside the skin of my back—rising and falling, rising and falling, rising and falling. After a while the big mouth says:

Listen, child. In the year coming, about this time, you will hold your Daddy to your chest. His whole skeleton, will be sand against your skin—the only skin, between your bones and his. You will feel the powdery pieces of him in the loops and whorls of your fingertips, in those tiny valleys carved, when you first touched, the world inside your mother.

You will say, ‘How can Daddy, who was just here, be resting on the ridges of my thumbs? Daddy, who just yesterday, had a nosebleed?’ Yes, you will hold him, your whole Daddy, in your two hands. You will think you are breathing alone in the world. The old feeling—you know the one—it will come at this time very strong. The longing will be great, the aching unyielding. You will lay on many grounds for many days, overcome.

You will say to yourself, ‘This being human business, it is not meant for me. Make me the mountain, the river, the grass. Make me the wind, the color, the light. Make me the animal, the salt licked by the animal.'

I listen to the sounds the big mouth is making. The jaws are splintered and cracked, exposing the thick roots of molars loosely burrowed in their sockets. How many snows have slept with these bones? How many slumbering crystal blankets have thawed and awakened, percolated down through this collagen matrix, seeped into underground rivers, flowed south to the sea? The mouth hears my thoughts. There is water in your bones, too, it says. Even your bones, are full of holes. I remember seeing the foggy breath of a ram in the glacier lilies, his steaming stream of urine catching the light, soaked up by earth. How many other bodies have the waters in my body passed through? How many bladders? How many lungs? How many bones?

When the feeling overwhelms you," the mouth goes on, "make your body into a shape, in which nothing feels stuck. In which you are liquid. Move from shape to shape—forehead to shins, palms to soles of feet, sacrum to ground, pelvis to sky. Become an alphabet of shapes, one letter into the next, until your whole body is speaking, is spoken. There is water in your bones. There are words in the marrow.

You will remember this day, here, breathing with bones. With all of us little mouths. There are mouths everywhere, always speaking. Bones are the mouths of the past and the future. They know how everything happens. They know the beginnings and endings of all the stories.

To know something in your bones.