MARLYS WEST
Here Is the Church
They had never spoken
to me before, save one, once, when a basketball jammed
its knuckle and for three days straight that finger
shouted and wept,
wept and shouted,
fat and purple, full of anger. This night
was different. I heard a tiny song from
deep inside the neat, white bones, unlike any melody I knew
and not unpleasant. The body had not sung
to me like this. The notes broke small and tidy,
no thick
organ keening yellow, no mushrooms
sprouting
in the soft dark of the brain. No one dies
of stiff fingers in the morning, but
the body had begun its journey, whistled
to me from a tree it had climbed.
I don' t how the night passed
with my back to it, nor how the sun came up having slipped
under the house. Trays of brown
cigarettes, unhappy
nights, the love that could not take; these would not now
come undone would they? My first step down the path
of dying, I was like a bride but backwards with
every well-wishing parishioner
forgotten until the night of singing finger bones;
a chorus
softer than geese, the officiant indicating
All rise, please. ![](../../images/bug_print.gif)
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