Bones From A Medic's Dustbin Poem by Valerie Laws

I hold this human spine like a rosary of bone,
fingering the winged vertebrae.
I stack them to nest snugly
in totem poles of little trolls;
spread them to examine
the delicate neck rings,
the beaky thoracic vertebrae
which held the ribs, the massive
cushions of the lumbar bones
which carried, strained and ached,
and the shield-shaped pelvic bone
like the head of a knobby snake.

I fit it to my body all the way up;
at least my size, and closer to me now
than ever lovers were. But all my touching
of this body's stem can't tell me
whether man or woman, young or old,
but I can guess, poor, and probably Third World,
dark as their bones are milky
like white Aero. Western skeletons
cannot be bought and sold.

I think of this spine cocked to one side
to hoist a child, bent under hot, hard work,
twisted by pain, stretched out in sleep
and hope that once some fingers counted
the bumps in the living back, gently as mine do now.