WEBVTT

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"The Dig."

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"Beyond the dark
souks of the Old City,

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beyond the Dome of the Rock,
gray and humped and haunted,

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beyond the eyes of
the men at the cafe,

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drinking their thimbles
full of hot tea,

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beyond the valley with
its scar of naked pipe,

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the perfect geometrical
arcs of irrigation,

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and someone incising
a dark furrow

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in a field, some plowman's
black gutter opening

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through the green, she is
waist-deep in this open grave,

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staring at the delicate
puzzle of my feet.

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Beyond her, in the
shadow of Tel Hesi,

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daubing and dampening
the earth, another woman

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finds the faint brickwork
of floor spidering the dust.

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On the hearth's
wedge-shaped arc of shadow,

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a scattering of charred millet,
and nothing else for miles.

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Nothing, but this bluff of ruin.

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One decapitated tower, one
window staved into the brick,

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and the bougainvillea
crawling across a wall,

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dragging its little bloody rags.

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She is standing here, thinking.

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She cannot bear the
way this foot, my foot,

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wants to step out of the earth.

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I don't care.

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I am using her to
leave the grave.

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And so, we go on.

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We go on until we cannot
go on, deepening my grave.

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And the trowel hit
stone, and I lie

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staring while she
makes the earth recede,

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reaches in, and pulls
me out, my jaw wired

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shut by roots, my
skull so full of dirt

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that suddenly the intricate
sutures come loose

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and, in her hands,
the whole head opens.

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In the shallow
setting where I lay,

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the small triangular
sail of a scapula,

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the ribs like the
grille of a car.

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She bones me like a fish, lays
the little pieces, the puzzling

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odds and ends, into dishes
of shellac and formalin.

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And wearily, I lean
my reassembled skull,

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sutures rich with glue, against
the wall of the filled beaker,

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a fine sweat of
bubbles on my chin.

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All night, through
the window of my jar,

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I watch her mend
with glue and wire

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the shallow saucer of my pelvis.

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We are nothing, she and I. We
are earth staring at earth."

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