I'm learning bones to please my father's ghost. Cranium, Maxilla - he knew them all and loved to reel them off, each Latin name sonorous and ornate, as from a tongue speaking the nineteenth century. He'd boast - his only vanity - total recall: Mandibula, Clavicula - and not one out of place, named wrongly, or forgot, although learned long ago, when he was young. Useless for me to argue that "breastbone" is really just as good and quite the same as Sternum; on that point, he became stone. Gospelled by my own time, I worshipped use: What use was it, I gibed, to learn by heart, in a dead language, static part by part? Better to know the function of the glands, for instance (which I knew he did not know), the mind's evasions, or the work of dreams. He didn't like my century: obtuse, almost, to change, he couldn't trust what seems; he wanted things to be, and to be there forever in their place, like arms and hands. Humerus, Radius, Ulna do not flow beyond mind's grasp like impulse or nightmare. He liked the rational, the decent look of bones in place, holding the flesh upright as bones do - as they seem to, in his book. When Latin failed him, and the torment came that numbered and wrenched his bones as on a rack, he learned the flow of nightmare into night. The journey he took up has no returning, and no soft speech will bring soft answer back, but (clumsy, slow Aeneas! I am learning Ilium, Ischium, Femur - a long prayer always descending earthward, rung by rung - Fibula, Metatarsus - to the ground in whose disorder lies that careful man. Pious at last, I pray his sleep is sound. We make amends in any way we can.© Rhina P. Espaillat
From Lapsing to Grace (Bennett and Kichel, 1992)