Archeology: Four Poems

Moon Jar, Century Unclear

Part of the pearlescent surface is gonefrom the glass back to sand, a labelof time, that through the losses narrowingthis one from the Phoenician through the hour

glass' opening to here, names this crust—only in number grains of year, not the shift,not the heat, the fires, the person of eachwho held it through, held the jar against its slake,

archeological glass breaks itselfdown     from the outer layers inward into—Feel the sandstorm of the glass dissolutionon the surface, the gritty cloud rise

out of the smooth, and transparence fadein and out of its crust, a moon through the clouds.

Unguentaria: We found…

… the art and crusts of residue suggestan ancient perfume bottle, ante roomof sensualized air, lung before its breathchambers in life, that perfume of perfumes.

The corners of the room of its contentswere filled in with dust, rounded in where three planes cut each other off, they nowsettle each into the other as this dust.

The room had a meaty sweet smell, greasyprocessed meat, a reminder that dustis mostly dead flake off our racked side offlesh, so the smell was a tincture of death,

not death fully eaten with rot, just the breathdown your neck, attar of essence. Stink rose of being.

Colonial Site

Touched with this fragrance, he livedin this room, in the slave quarters beingunearthed, in the bottled body of his timesin his color coming to light, master-

craftsman, the handle on his worn release:the site has given up specialized toolshe held and those the period usedto hold him—broken, nothing intact.

We have his hand in everything with nothingof his own everything that held the building up:the site bares its slave based economy.The water of the same boat we all are in

now     has risen its table over the oldfoundation, the artifacts we might findto grace this ship of state, time and salt threaten.

Vicinity of the French and Indian War

Get specific as a fingerprint and notknow the potter of the jar he left,the small head of a monkey dabbed onthe neck fragment, all there is,

and you almost have that hand in your ownmoist clay spiral tips pinching off your momentssigned and already also lost.    I boughtthe jar fragment in Quito for his print,

brought it home to Pittsburgh, left in the roomthat when the house burned, and looking up the stairsfor it, ended open to a star that night, and somewherein the demolition it was hauled to a fill

and ages from now handled again—what will be found done with    life in my hands?