I first came across this poem at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival a couple of years ago. I would have to say that this yearly festival is my favorite way thus far to experience poetry, and it is definitely one of my favorite things about Connecticut. Imagine an historic mansion turned art gallery, rolling pastures with white fences and the occasional sheep, walking through an arch in a stone wall into a sunken garden that gently slopes down to a gazebo in the center, a gathering of people in the late summer afternoon enjoying picnics and wine, and the opening sounds of music followed by the words of some of the country’s premier and upcoming poets. What’s not to love? And then, in the midst of all that, this:

The Want Bone by Robert Pinsky

The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth’s bell.
Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side.

The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,
A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.

Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals pleated like a summer dress.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away.

The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
My flower my fin my life my lightness my O.

Perfection. What do you think?