The Bones Upstairs
by William Doreski
In the little room upstairs
in the rear of the Methodist Church
you find human bones scattered
as if animals had feasted.
No one believes anymore
that dancing on Sundays is a sin.
No one recites the Apostles’ Creed
without crossing fingers and toes.
But I attended Sunday school
in that same room sixty years ago
and I assure you no human bones
lay scattered on the dusty carpet.
You want an anthropologist,
not the police. You want to bag
and tag the bones and send them
to the local history museum
where pottery and arrowheads
embody the world before our birth.
The gray light in that room taints
the corners of the intellect
where the chalk of bones has inscribed
maxims from Kant and Plato.
The painted pine furniture
reeks of the deaths of children
who crossed streets without looking
or dropped radios in the bathtub
or dove too deeply in the river
at the S-bend in the gorge.
You didn’t know those children,
but I could name them by touching
the bones and feeling them twitch.
Leave them. Don’t call anyone.
Let them regroup on their own,
and tonight they’ll clack down the stairs
and rustle into the snowy woods
to settle without a fuss.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire,
and teaches at Keene State College. His most recent book of poetry is The
Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies,
including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors.
His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals,
including Massachusetts Review, Atlanta Review,
Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly,
Worcester Review, Harvard Review, Modern
Philology, Antioch Review, and
Natural Bridge