Harp Bones

Drawing a comb of reeds and metal sheaths across his crooked teeth
a skinny man who points his fingers at another man who holds his fingers in V’s
curls back the yellowed knuckles. Harp bone marrow leaks through a row of teeth.

Sinful whines emerge from millimetered wooden bars,
bronzed notes from spit-worn vibrations;
Then he lets himself sing a word or so.

Earthquake against tongues mimic a flattened earth
Columbus was wrong, he’d sailed off the edge
and did he know the land made such a melody?

Waves like metal-tasting sounds on hair cells and ossicles
curl back the inner ear like curled fingers over the edge, the grooved
cover plate indented with the names of abstractions,
sounds that cannot be voiced.

The skinny man who used to point fingers like he used to be a Zimmerman
shimmers eyelids behind a harp catching spotlight, making cuts across
enameled teeth and marks in lips of names of sounds, eyes

flittering like breaths rattling the metal reeds in a tiny air coffin
where wind meets the afterlife,
transforms into A’s and B’s and C’s and G sharps.
Sharps like sharp fingernails and piercing 10’s carried by breaths or gasps

in, drawing notes to linger in two lungs, waiting below the ribs to release
and mingle with new notes on a curled tongue, folded
and pressed against wooden knots and holes,
a tongue fold so genetically articulate that each breath must be innate.


A metal box with so many sounds within it:
ribbed compartments jailing chirps and quick, piqued casts of weightless carbon,
a tongue with so many words folded within it; a tongue
like nimble fingers skimming the surface of an oral organ.

A thousand chromatic voices at one second, one origin, one
body. Ten fingers glued together in curves to transfer the winded notes:
V for Victory or Vietnam but A and B and C
and D and on and on to change the times, alternating

inhales and exhales in quick expansions of the ribcage; surging blood
in xylem and phloem of intricately cut wooden encavements. The skinny
man knocks the reed against leather-worn palms
to pound out the saliva and lingering psalms. He

with his stained slender fingers strips the metal armor down
to the wooden skeleton and finds parts of his soul stuck in the crevasses,
carbon bodily scum he scratches away with his smallest fingernails:
clearing space for when his harp soul marrow begins to leak again.