Calcium

Because I love the very bones of you,

and you are somehow rooted in my bone,

I’ll tell you of the seven years

by which the skeleton renews itself,

so that we have a chance to be

a person, now and then, who’s

something other than ourselves;

and how the body, if deficient,

will bleed the calcium it needs –

for heart, for liver, spleen –

from bone, which incidentally,

I might add, is not the thorough

structure that you might

suppose, but living tissue which

the doctors say a woman of my age

should nurture mindfully with fruit,

weightbearing exercise, and supplements

to halt the dangers of a fracture when I’m old;

and because I love you I will also tell

how stripped of skin the papery bone

is worthy of inscription, could hold

a detailed record of a navy or a store of grain,

and how, if it’s preserved

according to the pharaohs,

wrapped in bandages of coca leaf, tobacco,

it will survive long after all our books,

and even words are weightless;

and perhaps because the heaviness of your head,

the way I love the slow sweet sense of you,

the easiness by which you’re stilled,

how the fleshy structures that your skeleton,

your skull maintain, are easily interrogated,

it reminds me how our hands,

clasped for a moment, now, amount

to everything I have; how even your smile

as it breaks me up, has the quality of ice,

the long lines of loneliness

like a lifetime ploughed across a palm,

the performance of snow.

-- Deryn Rees Jones, from Signs Round a Dead Body