Wild Boar Jaw Bone

WILD BOAR JAW BONE Ruby Odell

This weighty bit of bone is still full of life . . . Bone—always shapely and sculptural even eons later. Worn and aged to the color of wellsteeped tea, cracked and fractured, a fragment only with a few missing chips; we can still see with ease the size of this animal full grown—stocky with bristled hair, a small eye. The jaw, the one piece of it we have to examine and ponder, seems to have all its teeth. They ’ re gnarled and caramel colored, polished with use. Still set neatly in precision along the dip of the jaw that swings up like a slender shoulder blade to meet the skull, the knob of the hinge, it seems to breathe, and we imagine some bunch of leafy matter in between those powerful molars making us know how it was—the crushing of fragrant leaves that once were held in motion here—a vegetarian creature, made for this . . . a huge tongue, a red gullet . . . gnash and grind . . .

It feels like a boomerang—it’ s something we know; it’ s something we don ’t know—this piece of bone and all its gleaming remains. Its perfect alignment is a clue. It’ s a piece of all that is, a thread to be unwound back to the beginning, the start of everything, the origin even of us—a brother, a mate, a fellow being, its ears perked, snout wet and nostrils flaring, tossing its head, the short-sighted eyes . . . casting the light.

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