The Bonegatherer
“jazz history of a / different sort, / studied / at close quarters” / the microscope / turned on “the biggest, / most intense, brutal and / complicated game in the/ world”
(selected passages)
the corpse is a hard
business; we scalpel
America
life lived on
anatomy lab stools and
cold coffee
sandwiches
eaten in the sweet stink
of decaying bodies
madness, all
kinds of
madness
“among other things, we
live off advanced
pathology—almost
parasitical”
piling
bones against memory
I could feel his words in my hand
as if Cortez himself had opened that
hydrant on Roosevelt
a city I
don’t remember, moving through
as much time as space—corner
of Chicago and Cicero, ice cream
trucks moving their product in August
half-melt and voices hawking the Sun-
Times or between cars,
man in a black suit
and tie calls,
“there’s an enlightened man!”
(how much radiance can you stand, brother?
your four years in
the Illinois College
of Medicine (your
graduation photo,
my first hard relic)
meanwhile, in the
anatomy labs, George
Miller, the custodian,
gathers the detritus:
candy bar wrappers,
hasty notes, surfaces
of muscle, skull and
skin—the preened
curiosity of a stopped
dog’s heart
box of
bones rolled down
the hall after sister
