Authenticity of the Bones

"When you were young, you walked
where you would, but when you are old,
you will stretch out your hands, and another
will carry you where you do not wish to go."
- Jesus' prophecy to St. Peter

The bones of St. Peter,
mortified Saint,
unearthed, almost complete,
except for his feet, shattered
in the act of crucifixion -
and the mouse bones
found by his skeleton -
the only certainties being
that one is a mouse
and one is a man.

Guided by our voices,
the lacuna of years leaves
us holding only fragments -
like these brittle shards
of language they left behind -
"aedicula, liturgy, sacrament" -
chants of the rope-dancers
writhing through Necropolis -
preserved, like the perfect bones
of the mouse, and the fable
of the man, and the Saint
dancing still without his feet.

*Alex Grant's chapbook, Chains & Mirrors, http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/OtherPubs.php was awarded the 2006 Randall Jarrell Prize. He was the 2004 winner of WMSU's Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship, won first prize in the 2006 Kakalak Carolina Poets Anthology contest, was a 2006 semi-finalist for Tupelo Press's Dorset Prize, and has been finalist or runner-up for The Felix Pollak and Brittingham Prizes, Discovery/The Nation(twice,) The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, The Arts & Letters Poetry Prize(3 times) and The Writers at Work Fellowship, among others. His ms., "Fear of Moving Water" was one of six finalists for the 2006 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook contest, and he was nominated for Meridian's Best New Poets anthology in 2005, 2006 and 2007. His work has recently appeared or is upcoming in The Nation, Connecticut Review, North American Review, Arts & Letters, Sycamore Review, Nimrod and Cimarron Review, among others. He works up and down the eastern seaboard for a not-for-profit healthcare organization, whose address you can read by the moon, and divides his personal time between Chapel Hill and Carrboro, where he lives with his wife, his dangling participles and his Celtic fondness for excess.