"The Dig."
"Beyond the dark souks of the Old City,
beyond the Dome of the Rock, gray and humped and haunted,
beyond the eyes of the men at the cafe,
drinking their thimbles full of hot tea,
beyond the valley with its scar of naked pipe,
the perfect geometrical arcs of irrigation,
and someone incising a dark furrow
in a field, some plowman's black gutter opening
through the green, she is waist-deep in this open grave,
staring at the delicate puzzle of my feet.
Beyond her, in the shadow of Tel Hesi,
daubing and dampening the earth, another woman
finds the faint brickwork of floor spidering the dust.
On the hearth's wedge-shaped arc of shadow,
a scattering of charred millet, and nothing else for miles.
Nothing, but this bluff of ruin.
One decapitated tower, one window staved into the brick,
and the bougainvillea crawling across a wall,
dragging its little bloody rags.
She is standing here, thinking.
She cannot bear the way this foot, my foot,
wants to step out of the earth.
I don't care.
I am using her to leave the grave.
And so, we go on.
We go on until we cannot go on, deepening my grave.
And the trowel hit stone, and I lie
staring while she makes the earth recede,
reaches in, and pulls me out, my jaw wired
shut by roots, my skull so full of dirt
that suddenly the intricate sutures come loose
and, in her hands, the whole head opens.
In the shallow setting where I lay,
the small triangular sail of a scapula,
the ribs like the grille of a car.
She bones me like a fish, lays the little pieces, the puzzling
odds and ends, into dishes of shellac and formalin.
And wearily, I lean my reassembled skull,
sutures rich with glue, against the wall of the filled beaker,
a fine sweat of bubbles on my chin.
All night, through the window of my jar,
I watch her mend with glue and wire
the shallow saucer of my pelvis.
We are nothing, she and I. We are earth staring at earth."