Creature of Blood and Bone Saw

Athens, Georgia
March 6, 2019

Well, we had a nice run, 

my old right hip and me.

Seventy laps around the sun,

and so many ecstatic miles 

of endorphin-spun joy 

I couldn’t count the cost.

But I would have been cat food 

forty thousand years ago, 

perhaps a snack for a saber tooth.

Hobbled by a bum hip, 

I could not have caught a ground sloth 

or scored an egg from an angry auk. 

You might have found my tangled heap 

of dried blood and gnawed bones 

mixed with gristle and scat. 

But forty thousand years on, 

we live in technological times. 

So I rise from blood and bone saw

hammered and reamed, teetering 

on a new titanium hip 

which once was ore from the Outback 

reduced in a fluidized bed, 

superheated to a thousand degrees 

in a stainless steel retort. 

Leached, jackhammered, 

crushed and pressed, 

then melted with a plasma arc 

and alloyed with aluminum 

so its Young’s modulus matches
my bone – behold 

the forty thousand dollar man,

incipient cyborg, titanium hipster.

By the mercy of insurance, 

craft of the surgeon, 

and sweat at the hands of a therapist,

soon I shall stride again.

Credits:
Thigh bone by the author.
X-ray by Athens Orthopedic Clinic.
Doodle by David Noah.