Waving Bones

Black cloth, white neck
white specks
sprinkle his shoulder
like snow in July
while air conditioners blow
wet hair from furrowed brows,
sweat-stain rivers
God has plowed.
Fisher-Price people
fill his pews,
each peg in their hole
waiting for their cues
to sit or stand.
he feels his hand
tremble,
his thick-lensed scrutiny
of the assembled
petitioners of prayer,
flakes fall from his hair
like the sin-microbes
he searches for,
a Christian scientist,
a surgeon for the lord.
his head a strip-mined mountain
sparsely covered with graying strands,
his hands
desperately grip the book
which gives directions,
orders from heaven.
others prefer
the evening paper
to map out their world,
a different plot
with plenty of hot
action; car crashes
and murder and tits
as solid as wisps
of smoke or the ghost
of the Jew that hangs on the wall
and bleeds on his pages
staining them red
while from his head
the flakes still fall
as the room grows colder
he shivers, though sure
of his eternal reward
he fears that final
tap on the shoulder.

Priests wave bones
and give benediction
but the truth is still
that all truth is fiction.

David W. Aronson
October, 1999