Bruce Bond

Columbarium

We talk softly here so as not to break
the illusion, the cabinets of this place
a library, hand carved, flush with books
of fiction, urns bronzed into the shapes
of some rare collection of the dead.
In the beginning was the word, or so
says the word, as if an origin could
speak still, if not to us, then through.
Ashes to ashes.  Not one but the many
inside the one, inside the book that dies
to open, to resurrect the written body.
We talk softly as if our own grief lies
asleep inside the arms of names, the part
we chisel into silence, and its art.

Bruce Bond is the author of nine published books of poetry, most recently Choir of the Wells: A Tetralogy (Etruscan, 2013), The Visible (LSU, 2012), Peal (Etruscan, 2009), and Blind Rain (LSU, 2008). His books The Other Sky (poems in collaboration with the painter Aron Wiesenfeld, Etruscan), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU), and Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan) are forthcoming. He is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for American Literary Review.