Your Sunday Poem

This one by Sandra M. Gilbert from her book, “Belongings.”

WHAT EXTENDS

a bony finger just now just
outside the glass-paned door
from deck to kitchen?
As if it were a breezy
shake of the hand, a chill
hello from a not

unfriendly passer-
by in the night,
the skinny thing kock-

knocks, it wants to be
friends with the one
who huddles alone

in the house, the one
by the oven who
sees just now

that this sudden guest is just
a bamboo wind chime
from holiday

Hawaii telling its usual
tale of the long-ago
tangles of jungle, the vivid

daze of yearning upward, of
scorch and wet and the tickle
of leaves –

and the chopping down and
the change into a skinless
thing that clatters its polish

with every gust, wanting
to show how
bone can speak of

pleasure still, how a dangle
of bones can say,
In my death


I greet you on this wild
night, in my death I prove
dead stems can make


a music of their own.