Old Bones by Lou Gallo

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Old Bones

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When I swivel my neck now I hear

cartilage popping and although it feels good

I think instantly of old Hasdrubal of Carthage

leading elephants across mountains

and I think of the bones in our back yard

on Columbus Street that my dog Spottie

buried, dug up, buried again, sucking

out that sweet marrow, and I think too

of the catacombs in Mexico City

that terrified me as a child—and

still terrify me—and of course who could

not think of Ozymandias . . .

oh I think lots of things because

how intimate is ossification and better

gather the memories while you can

before the neck becomes less a conduit

and more a fossil, not grainy like Lot’s wife

but solid, I like to think, marble,

a work of art some sculptor might carve

into a skylark or turtle or tiny peacock

that winds up on the family mantle.

At the moment I stare at the meat

placed before me in the Ancient Steak House

and can’t help poking at the bone

with my fork fancying it might emit

a signal of sorts explaining the difference

between its situation now and before when it

lived inside a cow . . . and I think of angels

and ghosts and sprites and how one

might thrive without the bones

always left behind, eroding into dust

eventually, the skull and teeth and

fingernails and ribs and elbows,

the structure collapsed,  the thinking

over, the old bones, old bones.

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Louis Gallo’s work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic,, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth,  Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review,and many others.  Chapbooks include The Truth Change, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books:  A New Orleans Review.  He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.

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