Augusto Jandolo: On Excavating an Etruscan Tomb
By Tom Sleigh

"When we lit our torches
My eyes went blind in the cave's
Cool dark--
the damp rock rough against my palms,
I remember how we strained to lift
the great stone lid: slowly
It rose, stood on end ... then fell
Heavily aside, crashing down
in the smoky,
Turbulent light
So that just for an instant I saw--
It wasn't a skeleton I saw;
not bones,
But a body, the arms and legs stiffly outstretched--
A young warrior's flesh still dressed
In armor, with his helmet, spear, shield, and greaves
As though he'd just been laid in the grave:

For just that moment
Inside the sarcophagus I saw the dead live--

but then, beneath
The sea-change of our torches,
At the first touch of air, the warrior
Who'd lain there, his body inviolable
For centuries, dissolved--
dissolved, as we looked on,
Into dust ...
his helmet rolling right, his round shield sagging
Into the void beneath his breastplate, the greaves
Collapsing as his thighs gave way ...

But in the aura
Round our torches a golden powder
Rose up in the glow and seemed to hover."

"Twenty-First Century Exhibit"

At the Museum of Natural History,

three guards in blue eyed us while the fourth,

shorter than the others, traced our bodies

with a wand. Satisfied, they returned our keys,

coffee, eyeglasses, and marched us into the exhibit

crafted to look like an office purged of its desks,

its loping workers, the maze of gray-board cubicles.

In the center of the room, a water cooler

stood patiently. In vain, we tried to explicate

the intent: "A metaphor for the modern personality,"

said a man with cockroach eyebrows. "No,

it's the perfect marriage of form and content,"

uttered a woman in a beret. Just then, the artist,

who had been hiding among us, crossed the rope

and knelt at the cooler, his lips working the spigot

while the rest of us stared, tongues too dumb

to say anything as the water hiccuped and disappeared.

He gleefully pointed at his rounded belly,

and then waddled to a door without a doorknob

marked with the universal triangle for toilet.

His work begun, he signaled to an unseen hand

to soften the lamps above us to a kinder orange

so he could more easily study us, his creation,

so he could attempt to learn what can't be learned,

like why I hate tuna salad garnished with pickle,

how my father wore it on his sleeve—pink-green

like his heart—the day he busted my nose

for spitting and then again for crying about it.

How could anyone ever know this by looking?

Still, he persisted with the examination

and turned us over in his mind, prizing our flaws

because they conferred character,

even as his own body began to betray him,

the sharp pain in his groin growing sharper.

And if it had been one of us across the rope,

on the rack for art, how long would we have waited

to shout finito! or genius! once our bladders

had swelled like accordions and we were dancing

our own version of the dervish he was madly spinning?

Bored with ordinary agony, we slouched

toward the tribal wail, the old altar and rot displays

of the twentieth-century wing now under renovation.

-- Tomás Q. Morin

--Tony Hoagland

"A Moment Ago"

We were out on the deck talking with mother,
watching the line of shadow climb the foothills,
intercepting the peaks around us one by one
as if the valley were a bowl being slowly filled
with darkness. She wore the blue cloth hat
with a flower, having just given up therapy.
We asked what she remembered of "little"
great-grandma and others we never knew.
It was hot. An afternoon storm had splotched
here and there the laurels, startling the swallows;
a dusty trickle had formed briefly in the throats
of the gutters. Mid-recollection, she paused.
When the day wears, she said, or when I begin to feel
too much for myself, I think of a song I heard
my mother sing I don't know how many times
over the sink washing dishes, a child's song,
and it lifts me.  It was some minutes later
that the leaves of the poplar began suddenly to rattle,
exactly as the leaves here in the darkening yard
ten years and two thousand miles away just did,
a harsh, dry sound like seeds shaken in a pod.
It is a brittle world. Over and over dusk
wells up in us; birds fly uncertainly overhead.

-- Philip White

"Bureau of Missing Persons"

Silver set with opals around my left index finger, matching drops dangling from my earlobes.  I adore opals, the mix of ever-changing colors on the surface and below, their milky glow.  Given how I've been drawn into naps lately, I've taken to fancying them as foci of meditation and relaxation. 

So many naps.  And then awake too late into the evening, then alarms blare before the sun peers over the horizon and I stumble off to the commute.  Maybe it's the remnants of my New Year's cold, now being beaten into submission by another round of antibiotics.  Maybe it's something else.  More often than not, I've found myself on the sofa, or my bed, with heavy eyes and no willpower to drag myself back into the land of the aware. 

Boo doesn't help.  He's been snuggly and affectionate, curling up in my arms and bestowing kisses on my face.  I stroke his fur, warm and silky, and let myself sink down, down, down into dreams.  I know I walk the dreamworld, but I can't remember my adventures once I wake.

Opals have a reputation for bad luck, because of the way they break if you don't pamper them. No extreme shifts in temperature, no battering with force, careful application of oils so they don't dry out.  They've never been unlucky for me. 

It's strange, because a thought lurks in the back of my mind whenever I inventory my jewelry: in case of disaster, you've portable wealth.  Not that I expect a crisis of such an extent that the banking system and paper money become unusable, and yet.  I could wear gold and silver and diamond and rubies and trade them, piece by piece, for necessities. 

Maybe it's not such an outré notion, given the times in which we live.  Atomic fire over Washington, and how would I react?  The possibility seems so remote, though.  And I'm able to contemplate it, to game feint and retreat and options. 

The true horrors are the ones that I recoil from the slightest contemplation of.  Death of beloved family members. Certain types of injury. Far more likely, if you take automobile accident statistics into account. The merest hint and I flinch back, refuse to think about it, because if I did, if it happened, it would be a precipice jerking the ground from under my feet, leaving me to plunge into the abyss.  Falling, falling, falling, and I've always suffered from vertigo. 

I don't know if I could claw my way back, fingernails sunk into earth, muscles straining, or if I'd land, broken, and never recover.

* * *

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

--Robert Frost (first two stanzas only)

"Ode"
By Maureen N. McLane

Sad in bed you read Horace
the ode in which an aging lover pleads
not to be inflamed again
by a perishable love

and a tear escapes his eye
and a tear escaped your eye.
I was wild for you and heedless
I am glad love to say this

I was afflicted and afflicted you.
Be careful what you wish for
you warned. I was not careful
nor in the end thank god were you.

The charms I recited
the songs I sang
were lit by a light
almost completely impersonal.

Yet what are we but vehicles
of waves we never directly perceive
except those days the light bending
around our bodies becomes our body
—the lovers ablaze on the pyre

My doctor doubled my meds, and life is bearable again. Chemical dependency is such a hydra. Sweet, sweet serotonin, savior of my soul but enabler of my feelings of inadequacy. 

At least now I have my protector inked into my skin.  Mama still doesn't know. I run my fingers over the slightly-raised lines and smile.  He'll guard the long slog of cold days until spring, a silent watcher bringing warmth against the icy winds and snow.

I need to plant my paperwhites, and anticipate the first buds of March.

Wild fancies will begin tomorrow, I know they will. But how to bring them to reality?  I know from too many daydreams more alluring than sugar that willpower alone is not enough. There has to be action, even when all I want to do is curl beneath a blanket and pet Boo.

The Innocent One

The watcher guarded the innocent one,
that was their relationship.
When the innocent one was in danger,

had angered the mother or the father
maybe, walked out on some thin ice

on purpose (for the sharp defining edges
of it) and suddenly needed a rescue,
the watcher would be the rescuer.

That allowed the innocent one to grow up
reckless: she was always stabbing herself

in the heart to see what each new kind of love
felt like. Then her savior the watcher
would heal her wound by explaining everything.

We're a very solid couple, the two of us.
We've grown up into a fine double person.

--Chase Twitchell

Mediterranean Trio

I noticed that not far away some boys were playing street cricket, with a wicket marked in chalk on the wall behind the batsman, and was gratified by this sign of enduring British influence.  (Corfu, as I dare say you know, was under British rule for about fifty years in the 19^th century; here, as in other parts of our Empire, it was our enlightened policy to prepare the inhabitants for self-government by teaching them to play cricket.)

--Selena Jardine, letter to Julia Larwood from Corfu

The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell (1985)

Beloved, among other delights, for having a character named Hilary, even if we're never informed of gender.

* * *

The God Forsakes Antony

When suddenly at the hour

an invisible troupe is heard passing

with exquisite music, with shouts –

do not mourn in vain your fortune failing you now,

your works that have failed, the plans of your life

that have all turned out to be illusions.

As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,

bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving.

Above all do not be fooled, do not tell yourself

it was only a dream, that your ears deceived you;

do not stoop to such vain hopes.

As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,

as it becomes you who are worthy of such a city;

approach the window with firm step,

and listen with emotion, but not

with entreaties and complaints of the coward,

as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,

the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,

and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.

--C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933), Rae Dalven translator

"The night before battle, Antony was awakened by musicians traveling out of the city to the enemy camp. He took it as a sign that his protector Dionysus had deserted him." -- Plutarch

* * *

The din of onset resounded.

Over the barley stubble and round the olive trees, crashing through vineyards half-picked when the laborers fled, knocking down the props and treading the grapes into bloody wine, the press of men swayed and mixed and seethed, their mass swelling and bursting like bubbles, rising and settling like yeast.  The noise was deafening.  Men yelled to one another, or to the enemy, or to themselves; or screamed in some piercing agony beyond what they had known flesh could feel.  Shields clashed, horses squealed, each corps of the confederate army shouted its own battle-paean at full stretch of its lungs.  Officers roared orders, trumpets blew.  Over everything hung a great cloud of rusty, choking dust.

--Fire from Heaven, Mary Renault (1969)