Free Good Bones by Margaret Atwood Page B

the wrinkles, the incidentals. The right shade, the right amount of sun, and see, out come the bones, the good bones, the bones come out like flowers.
2.
    Them bones, them bones, them dry bones, them and their good connections; we sang them over once around the campfire, those gleeful strutters to the Word of the Lord, or to our own hands clapping. Behind each face, each lovely body in its plaid shirt, soft bum on hard granite, I could guess the Hallowe’en skeleton, white and one-dimensional, a chalk bonehead drawn on a blackboard; a zombie, a brief
memento mori
, dragged out for burning, like a heretic, flanked by the torches of the incandescent marshmallows.
    Our voices made short work of them, them bones. Tossed on the bonfire they flared up like butter, and went out and were dismissed.
You are my sunshine
, we sang, though not to them. We nestled closer, jellifying each other, some of us boneless.
    So much for death. So much for death, at that time, there.
3.
    This is the cemetery. The good bones are in here, the bad bones are out there, beyond the church wall, beyond the pale, unsanctified.
    The bad bones behaved badly, perhaps because of bad blood, bad luck, bad childhoods. Anyway, they did not treat their bodies well. Walked them over cliff edges, jumped them off bell-towers. Tried to fly. Broke things.
    The good bones lie snug under their tidy monuments. They have been given brooches to wear, signet rings, poems carved on stone, marble urns, citations. Circlets of bright hair. They have been worthy and dutiful, they deserve it. That’s what it says here: the last word.
    The bad bones have been bad, so they are better left unsaid. They are better left unsaying. But they were never happy, they always wanted more, they were always hungry. They can smell the words, the words coming out of your mouth all warm and yeasty. They want some words of their own. They’ll be back.
4.
    This is my friend, these are her bones, these ashes we pour out under the tulips. When she fell down on the sidewalk her hipbone shattered. It was hollow in there, eaten away, like a tree with ants. Bone meal.
    They put her in the hospital and I went to see her. I’m terrified, she said, but it’s sort of interesting. My turds are white, like bird turds. It’s calcium. I’m dissolving myself, I’m shitting bones. I guess you can do worse than be fertilizer. Other things can grow.
    We are both fond of gardens.
5.
    Today I speak to my bones as I would speak to a dog. I want to go up the stairs, I tell them. Up, up, up, with one leg dragging. Is the ache deep in the bones, this elusive pain? Does that mean it will rain? Good bones,
good
bones, I coax, wondering how to reward them; if they will sit up for me, beg, roll over, do one more trick, once more.
    There. We’re at the top.
Good
bones! Good
bones!
Keep on going.

Acknowledgements
    Some of these pieces have appeared in:
    CANADA
    The Malahat Review, This Magazine, Saturday Night, Quarry, Le Sabord, Tesseracts 3
(Porcépic). Three also appeared in
Selected Poems II
(Oxford), which is out of print.
    UNITED STATES
    Harper’s, Ms., Antaeus, Translation, Critical Fictions
(Bay Press). “The Female Body” and “Alien Territory” appeared in
Michigan Quarterly Review
, in its Female Body and Male Body issues, respectively.
    UNITED KINGDOM
    Elle, Sunday Times, Soho Square
(Bloomsbury).
    MEXICO
    Earth Anthology
(Grupo de los Cien).

Afterword

BY ROSEMARY SULLIVAN
    On the front cover of
Good Bones
, a strange creature, part sibyl, part harpy, perches on a naked female leg. Her tail feathers are composed of human eyes, her wings of lipsticked mouths with smiling teeth, her head feathers of grapes under a ruby hat, and her breastplate of sunglasses. She is the muse of this shrewd, often hilarious collection of stories. Margaret Atwood has designed the cover art for a number of her books. Here the reader has only to look at her collage to be forewarned: this muse packs a scorpion sting.
    Atwood