Read Poem: RESTLESS BONES, by Eileen Patterson

The daughter speaks of him.
He hears the words falling on his grave.
There is nothing he can do but shift in the soil.

Night after night the dead look to the stars and God displays their lives in every sparkling disk,
from birth to death repeating their Godless existence.

In January snow covers the mounds of dirt,
that separate the living and the dead.
He hears the crunch of feet walking above him.
The branches on the trees rise up and down,
the sound is like an angel’s sigh.

Is that you? He asks

In spring he bathes in wet earth. Birth is everywhere.
Babies push to life dropping from their mother’s womb,
green nubs on trees cutting through hard branches,
Tulips and Crocuses straining to break the seal of winter.

Summer, he hears voices here and there, tending to their dead.
There is no life above him, no cries of grief. Only weeds grow above his bones.
Fall is the loneliest time. The wind wails and the graves that have no mourners weep.

The daughter’s voice is weak, frayed as a tattered garment.

There are questions in your voice.
In the life I’ve lived, I can answer nothing.
What words will heal your life?
Is it just my speaking you long to hear?
I will grab a crow from the sky and teach it my voice.
But is it the truth you want? There is no truth that I know of.
There are only facts.
Do you still want to know?

There are sounds above him. A breath of wind whistles through the cracks of his endless death.

Is that you? He asks.

All of us walk through this land that is so dark and malicious. We get tangled in the roots
of the trees, some try to end their suffering by grabbing the feathery tendrils and wrapping them around their necks. They soon learn that you can’t kill the dead.
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Occasionally the light from the living world shines down on us
and the shadows of our bones tremble.

Can you hear me? Or am I only talking to this stale air I breathe in? There is a muffled cry above me. Did a fledgling fall from its nest?

Is that you?

He promised her his voice, so he hands her a memory.

Mother kept an album page after page of a perfect family.
None of it was true. The bruises didn’t show in the black and white photographs.
After the old man died, I found them crammed into a shoe box. Mother died years before.
His final cruelty towards her. The perfect life she created in that book, abandoned in a box, as messy as our lives had been.
I am fascinated by their stiff gray bodies. There is a photograph of me at eight years old. This was the year life shifted. I no longer held onto that kernel of hope he might change. Reality hit me like a ghost passing through me.
Five years later I found a pint of father’s finest. It was a new world of easy edges and voices that almost sound kind.

A winter storm thunders above him, the wind wrestles a tree from its roots. It lands loudly across his grave.

Is that you? He asks.
At night, in the stars the voices torment me. I remember all of it.
Even If you decorate the grave I lie in, the stench of my sins will kill the blooms you plant.
There is no excuse for the monster I became.

Daughter? He whispers.
Lean over the edge of my grave,
Tell me the life you have.
Death is so quiet I ache to hear a voice.
He leans against the wall of death.
His eyes lift up to the life above him hoping to see just a touch of her shadow,
but he only sees eternal darkness.
Rain steadily taps on his grave.

Is that you?