ARCHEOLOGY OF DESIRE

Kill Hole

[38] Kill Hole Harriet Silliman Cosgrove, 1877-1970 Take the Victorian, like a faded valentine, and Place it against the real— A cave, the desert heat A woman of forty Decides it is time to start digging For the past, for those Who buried their dead beneath the floors Of their houses, corpses With knees flexed As if in the womb. A gracious house with a wrap-around porch Lace tablecloths, a roast, the usual Conversation A wife—she digs A widow—she keeps digging As archeologist, she may lecture At Harvard University As a woman, is barred From attending lectures Must stand in her skirts, constrained To the hall, straining To hear the jargon of her field, At the Peabody Museum, Where I, a melancholy undergraduate Wasted snowy afternoons Inhaling the scent of looted collections Mayan plaster casts Huge amethysts Moth-eaten lynx Painstaking glass flowers Showing cross-sections Of sexual reproduction. [39] What she finds is this: Black and white pots, Hundreds, thousands, Painted with joyful scenes Yin yang fish Air full of butterflies Flute players Lines fresh, lively as Knossos murals Jar with a Cretan octopus. Each pot has a kill hole Placed right through its belly, The foot it has to stand on, Soul of the pot set free, Placed over the face of the corpse. What she finds is this, her own face, Aging gently in the mirror Her own hand Copying the leaping deer, the dragonfly, These images that live again Because she found them. ...