What the Bones Forget

Understandably, you worry
More about the brain. We do too.

You wouldn’t want to forget us.
We don’t want to be forgotten,

And that’s all business of the brain.
But bones, your bones especially,

Have such memories would shudder
Carolyn Kizer in her quotes—

Her paraphrases—Yeats and Proust—
On what she, they, and the bones knew.

Don’t you know, everything you know,
You only know as you forget,

If in your bones or in your head?
Your bones have long since forgotten

How to have clean lines and stand straight.
Every healed scar has forgotten

How to be unscarred. In itself,
You remember nothing, nothing

But figuration—not what was,
Much less how to be it, but what

It was like. Memory’s a trope,
Words or not, for what used to be,

Not what used to be. Bones forget
Every stem cell they let float free,

Every equipotential hope
They produced to produce your youth.