In this week’s poem, Michelle Menting does some vivid and surprising consideration of bones. I love this poem’s imaginings about porous bones, at once whimsical and eerie, and its sudden shift in gravity and longing when it turns to the solid bones of the common loon.

Michelle Menting teaches creative writing and poetry at the University of Southern Maine and directs Gibbs Library in the town of Washington.

Upon Learning You Have Bird Bones
By Michelle Menting

You wonder how porous, if they’re pocked
like pumice. Do they just look like bone,

like bleached rock but light: your skeleton
a stale sponge, it can snap so simply

like coral on a beach? Are your fingers
& toes linked like stencils connected

in place: just letters—all caps or cursive—
made of papyrus? Like airplanes

of paper: shapes no longer serving
designated purpose (to hold up, to solidify—

stature like statue). But oh, what promise,
to be able to fly. A loon weighs ten pounds,

her wings span five feet, and she spends
most her life on bodies of water, cresting

cradled waves, plunging into depths
a Giant Sequoia’s height. Solid

are her bones. To be like that. For this lift
your new lightness allows you into air

intrigues you less than that ability to dive,
to resist a surface that just reflects the sky.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Upon Learning You Have Bird Bones” copyright 2024 by Michelle Menting, was originally published in The Inflectionist Review. It appears by permission of the author.