bones

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

The evil that men do lives after them the good is oft interred with their bones.

To love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be destroyed

Those minutiae calcify into the bones of our intimacy.

Sweat seems to bleed / like pride from their bones.

Each October I walk into the woodslooking for bones: rabbit skulls,a grackle spine, the pelvis of a deerwith the blood bleached out. What diedin the lush of roses and mintshines out from the tangle of twigsthat bind it to the placeof its last leaping. The living lackthat kind of clarity. In late April,when the water spreads out and outtill everything is lilies and seepage,there is only the mystery of tracks,a rustle receding in the many reeds.And so the bones accumulateacross my windowsill: the flightlesswings and exaggerated grins,the silent unmoving remindersof where the glories of April lead.

It is better to have ten skeletons in your closet, than walk with no bones.

poetrymelts my bones.enters my blood.and changesits composition.

Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann's, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones.

Souls grow on bones but die beneath bankers' hours...

The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain's voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn't realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead......When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she'd always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught on the ocean, and she'd gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she'd said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin.It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there'd be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you'd see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt.If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live forever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon, there'd be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn't think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. Nobody's mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair. Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he'd imagine the boats rocking the the priest's voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus......Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue forever.

You once told me you could stand many things._ My voice was raspy from all the emotions battering against those well-honed inner defenses.__o can I. I can stand whatever Apollyon dishes out, can take the bigotry from others over what I am, the freaky ghost juju from Marie, all thecraziness my mother can throw at me, and even the pain of my uncle dying. But the one thing that I would never, ever recover from would be losingyou. You made me promise before to go on if that happened, but Bones___ere my words broke and tears spilled down my cheeks___ wouldn__want to.__e__ been near the side of the bed when I started talking, but was in my arms before the first tear fell. Very softly, his lips brushed over those wetstreaks, coming back pink from the drops still shimmering on them.__o matter what happens, you will never lose me,_ he whispered. __ am forever yours, Kitten, in this life or the next.

They buried him in dirt that smelled like broken batteries, and crouched in a fiberglass shed while the acid rain poured down to dissolve his flesh and bleach his bones.

A sense of hopelessness had invaded his bones, as chill and as inescapable as the rain.

Meltwater (from the book Blue Bridge)Up here. A faceLoses its linesI look to seeThe colour of your eyes _They have turnedTo water.I lean forwardTo catchThe scent of your hair __ll I smell is heather.I touch your handAnd all I feel is earth and stones.There is nothing leftBut the hillside__ breastYour flesh and bonesHave vanished.

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.

War is not just the shower of bullets and bombs from both sides, it is also the shower of blood and bones on both sides.

Across from her, Hunter devoured her meal even more completely than she had. Sinclair watched her sink sharp teeth into the chicken bone, heard it snap, then the soft grunt of satisfaction. She made soft sucking sounds then emptied her mouth of the tiny ground up remains on a corner of her dish. Hunter ate with rabbit-like intensity, biting and sucking and spitting in an even rhythm until all that was left on the plate was a small brown and beige pile of ground bones. She finally looked up and caught Sinclair staring.