What the Bones Know

By Carolyn Kizer b. 1925 Carolyn Kizer

Remembering the past

And gloating at it now,

I know the frozen brow

And shaking sides of lust

Will dog me at my death

To catch my ghostly breath.

I think that Yeats was right,

That lust and love are one.

The body of this night

May beggar me to death,

But we are not undone

Who love with all our breath.

I know that Proust was wrong,

His wheeze: love, to survive,

Needs jealousy, and death

And lust, to make it strong

Or goose it back alive.

Proust took away my breath.

The later Yeats was right

To think of sex and death

And nothing else. Why wait

Till we are turning old?

My thoughts are hot and cold.

I do not waste my breath.

Carolyn Kizer, "What the Bones Know" from Cool, Calm & Collected: Poems 1960-2000. Copyright © 2001 by Carolyn Kizer. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Cool, Calm & Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (Copper Canyon Press, 2001)

Biography

Poet, essayist, and translator Carolyn Kizer was born in 1925 in Spokane, Washington. Raised by a prominent lawyer and highly educated mother, Kizer’s childhood was suffused with poetry. Of her development as a poet, she noted to the Poetry Society of America: “My parents were both romantics: father favored the poems of [John] Keats; mother went for [Walt] Whitman. No evening of my childhood passed without my being read to. But . . .

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