A MODEST MOUND OF BONES

That short-sleeved man, our uncle owns
the farm next our farm, south and west of us, and
he butchers for a living, hand-to-mouth. Once walking on his land
we found a hill, topped by a flower, a hill of bones.

They were rain-scrubbed clean,lovely things.
Depending how the white sun struck, chips of col-
or -- green, yellow, dove-blue, a lightbay -- flew off the sul-
len stilled turning there. To have seen those clickless rings,

those prisonerless ribs, complex
beyond the lathe's loose jaws, convolute compounds
of knobs, rods, hooks, moons, absurd paws,subtle flats and rounds:
no man could conceive such finesse, concave or -vex.

Some warp like the belly of a wheeze.
As a cat thinks, some bend, or curve as if hunting
infinity, toward which to tend. How it sags! what bunting
is flesh to be hung from such elegant balconies?

-- John Updike

This poem first appeared in the April 26, 1957 issue of Commonweal.