Jessica
At the Natural History Museum
I don’t know the names
of all the bones beneath
the Plexiglas. The hollow
of the doe’s rib cage, curled
around the miniature bones
of her unborn fawn. The placard
tells me they died together, frozen
in place, until they were discovered
millions of years later. I read
no Latin names, no new ways to describe
the fragile skeletons they left behind.
The display is illuminated from below
so that visitors can see the hairline
cracks, the articulation in their vertebrae.
I think of my X-rays, the blue
illumination of my tibia and patella.
I think of the before and after:
patella floating to the left,
unanchored by its ligaments and now
nailed into place, two screws
drilled into the shifted bone. All
of these angles and outlines
are a mystery to me: the deer’s brittle
limbs and my bisected and repaired injury,
coffined in balsa wood and plastic
or burned on black film, permanent
evidence of our three brief lives.
***
Realistically, I should be banking this poem for NaPoWriMo, which starts tomorrow. I should be saving it for that dead time around April 20th, when I’ll be fresh out of inspiration and wondering what the hell I was thinking. That’s the smart money. But, no, I am going to stay true to the intent of NaPoWriMo, which is to write more poems.
On Tuesday, I wrote this poem in the hopes that I would be priming the pump, so to speak. I wanted to get back into practice before launching in to the poetry writing marathon that is National Poetry Writing Month. I hope that this poem and engaging again in this practice will help me to invigorate and sustain my writing practice for months after NaPoWriMo officially ends.
I wrote this poem on my mini-vacation to Lincoln, Nebraska. We visited the Natural History Museum on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus (Go Huskers!). Now that I’ve returned, I’ll be posting some more pictures from my visit to scenic and beautiful Lincoln. In between my daily poems, of course.
