by Steven Heighton

In that dream, scavengers
bore his skeleton into the sky
piecemeal,

disarticulate and silenced, save
for the sighs of the ventriloquist
wind in hollowed ulna,

susurrations in the radius,
a femoral music, a marrow
of music—and he no more

than those tunnelling tunes, Self
and the elements
unsundered at last, skull’s oubliette

unlocked, cracked
like the clamshell a kittiwake
lets fall over rocks—

and this is the eventual
ecstasy of skeptics—
those who swapped the rush of being

in earth’s brief, arduous eden
for bunkered years in solitary,
imposing self-sentence
sentence by sentence,
who loved things only
aslant, never with the heart

full-frontal, who never once
forgot their own names when sea-
or skinscapes intervened,

never saw (eyes lasered
clear of the cataracts
of habit) rain

falling like a ransom, stars
stammering celestial news,
and the old moon, reminted.

Steven Heighton has published two books: Every Lost Country, a novel set in Tibet, and Patient Frame, a poetry collection that includes the five poems in this issue of PRISM international. His 2005 novel, Afterlands, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a best of year selection in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK, and has recently been optioned for film.