A group of children drags three animal skulls out of the woods and makes them the stars of a homemade museum. That is the whole event, and the poem's quiet achievement is to show how much sits inside it. Its central idea is that children meet death without the grown-up reflex of sadness or squeamishness. They meet it with wonder, and that wonder is a kind of respect, even though it is also a kind of plunder.
The first stanza builds the museum as a list. Conches, fossil ferns and brain coral sit alongside "blue & green glass bottles / that once held medicine." The skulls tower over them, "grinning stars," a phrase that is funny and slightly eerie. A skull can't stop grinning, and "stars" makes the children sound like the proud managers of a show. The title's "Curating" adds a grown-up irony, since the poem is looking back on this childhood with an adult's vocabulary. The bottles also set up a pattern. They "once held" something, as the skulls once held brains, and the neighboring "brain coral" quietly nudges the connection along. The poem never says that everything in this museum is an empty container, but the collection says it for them.
The stanza ends with its sharpest move. The loose teeth "soon went missing, / like strip-mined mountains." The comparison jumps from a child's shelf to a wrecked landscape, and it makes the children's collecting look like a small act of extraction. They left "their other bones littered about" and carried off only the showpieces. The poem doesn't scold, but the simile lets the adult speaker feel a pang that the children never did. Before that, there is a small, tender detail: an elderly neighbor remembers the mule's name, "Charlie." It is the only moment when one of these animals becomes an individual with a history, and the information arrives almost by accident, from someone old enough to remember when the mule worked.
The second stanza turns to the children's way of seeing. "We didn't think about their deaths / or even what they'd been / before, as working livestock; / they were still live enough for us." The word "live" is slightly off, closer to a live wire or a live broadcast than to "alive," and it catches exactly how a child can treat bones as active and present. The children admire the skulls the way you admire good design. The "zigzag sutures" (the z sounds themselves seem to zigzag) make the skulls "self-evidently whole / & perfect," and the jaws that hinge "behind the empty eyes" inspire "awe." The line breaks help here. "Where / the parts of the skull fit together" holds its pieces across the break, much as the sutures do.
The form is plain free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. The sentences are conversational and full of ampersands, and the line breaks often delay the key word, as in "we carried / home, those skulls." That delay feels like the effort of hauling them back. The poem's music is quiet, made of small chimes like "conches" and "coral" or "blue & green glass."
The ending is the most important choice. The last sentence slows down to describe every kid who would "stop, / lift the mule's top jaw / & make him talk." The pronoun matters, because Charlie is "him," not "it." The children, who claim not to think about death, are in fact doing the oldest thing the living do for the dead, which is to lend them a voice. The final line is four short words, a joke and a small resurrection at once. It also hints at what the poem itself is doing. The neighbor supplied the name, and the poem, in its way, makes him talk too.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it neither sentimentalizes childhood nor condemns it. It lets the awe stand beside the loss, and it trusts a few concrete objects to carry both.