Cleaning the Bones by Richard Weaver

I've never seen anyone eat fried chicken
the way my grandfather did. As thoroughly.
It amazed me that any bones survived.
All that remained after dinner,
(lunch to my grandparents
since dinner was supper)
was a small, neatly stacked pile,
picked clean, never enough left
for an anthropologist to reconstruct
even a mythic bird. No skin.
No gristle. The marrow sucked free.
Though I still try I can never clean the bones
as he did. Gristle, bone, marrow and all,
it disappeared easily into a man who had once
with his brothers’ help, taken apart
a neighbor's wagon as a prank
and reassembled it thirty feet up
in a tree; a man who never shrank
in my eyes even as age outran him.
At 60 he'd once raced a cousin
forty years younger, and sprinted
past him. I admired his strength,
the hand that always shook yours
in a test of sinew and bone,
always stronger even at 90,
sure of its grip and firm with life.
That hand extends itself to me tonight
as I remember what his life taught:
love needs no form to express itself.
Even the small pile of bones
left on a plate wiped clean
with a last slice of bread
were a testimony to his life.
An offering I now know as part of me.



Post-Covid, Richard Weaver has returned as the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Among his other pubs: conjunctions, Louisville Review, Southern Quarterly, Free State Review, Hollins Critic, Little Patuxent Review, Loch Raven Review, The Avenue, and New Orleans Review. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and wrote the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005). Recently, his 180th prose poem was published. He was a finalist in the 2019 Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry.