Shadow Bones

I like the way this is about time, and also uses time to structure what it has to say. It even has a kind of turn, like a mini-sonnet—pivoting from ‘Last year’ in line one to ‘This year’ in line 7. 

In the first stanza the movement from ‘Last year’ to ‘Each day’ and ‘Each night’ is delicately, tenderly paced. The ‘tiny returning steps’ that mark the disintegration of the small bones are also the steps of the observer—the person who returns each night to watch. And the observation evokes beauty in the detail—the ‘fragile luminescence’, ‘the grey-green light’. We associate green with life, grey with death/decay—both are there. 

The rabbit’s bones are disappearing. No sign of them a year later. They have gone completely and naturally. Except that they are still there, both in the poet’s memory and in the words of the poem. The references to what isn’t there—the ‘glimmering bones’, the ‘perceptible greening’ make those absences into presences in the poem. The knowledge of a death is ‘imprinted in the earth’ just as the poem is printed on the page—and it is a wholly earthly knowledge. It lives ‘beneath the grass’—where the dead lie—underneath that green symbol of life. And so of course the poem is about every death, as well as time and memory.

Helena Nelson