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  • Prehistory, and Piece of Old Cornice Among Trees and Random Trash
  • Marianne Boruch (bio)

Prehistory

      At the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh

Which skull to offer the gods first: pig or human, or the sheep one, its boney black shield of a face with horns stumping up, little grand things. Or the twisting, hell-bent antlers reclining, the rest of the reindeer lost. Now do it. Patch in eyes gone rigid in those heads before the spear and then the clubbing.

Shattered bowls in the glass case. And a sword “deliberately broken.” That word deliberate, like the taste of blood, surprises.

In return, the gods do what?

Storms, good and bad. Life is short, or it’s not. There’s luck and unluck. Reward, revenge. Some gods breathe: that’s oxygen. One might throw a switch: that’s spring.

Step out into time, it’s hard to know anything. Trains, their stalk of light on a railway bridge, the moon, the slow tide. Wheels burn and spark if you could see as gods do, in boredom, in anger, busy with ancient simplicities: to let live or to smite—

Don’t. Not yet. Just look at him now.

Row 8, the sleeper at an angle against the window’s flash and flash off the bay, a rail’s rhythm, [End Page 182] closed eyes, breath to breath

and grateful for none of it on waking. Which of the gods spoke? He won’t remember. Threat held back— still threat under glass, a few broken things.

And beauty? Equals the gods stare anyway.

He can’t dream the ticking weight of that either, afloat mindless as fish are below. [End Page 183]

Piece of Old Cornice Among Trees and Random Trash

Just lying in woods, once fired to thick terracotta now partial, part shattered as a sentence dropped mid-sentence because

everyone else left the room. Or it’s a verb back to its infinitive lonely, theoretical: to believe, to give up, oh, to lie down.

How story is made: I saw the bigger part of whatever it came from, neighbor to the old blistered sink, and maybe it really was a mantel upon which certain aspirations leaned like people with meaningful envy and late afternoons to kill with a nice drink before dinner.

The standard oak leaves carved into it when clay at first, innumerable various fruits not quite recognizable. Even so, an honest shard of still-life though the old Dutch painters would have warmed up such a vision with a half glass of wine—safer than water—and added mystery by way of a few torn feathers. Not the piece I found with its little pock-marked shield still emboldened between what might be grapes.

Which is to say this fragment accepts rain in the dump as an offering, years of rain behind that, no less. There’s wealth. One suggestion can equal elegance. There’s why and why again I get

trapped working from a detail, blowing it up intact where fine and regal lived in an actual house, the well-appointed kind with [End Page 184] zero zero zero nod to me and most as in the likes of multiplied, inevitable, underfoot. They say so it goes. And it does. But what if

an argument broke out. Or it’s about to break in real time or by telepathy you can see in all the faces. Small condescensions razored off in such a house at that mantel as fallen snow-blinding chaff on the one standing in

for the ravaged, so secret to begin with— Nothing. The perennial always-thus nothing for it but to will

the hammer down on the perfectly made thing. [End Page 185]

Marianne Boruch

Marianne Boruch’s most recent poetry collections include Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) and the forthcoming Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (Copper Canyon, 2016). The Book of Hours, also from Copper Canyon Press, was the recipient of the 2013 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. Boruch’s prose includes two essay collections and her memoir The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, APR, Poetry, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere...

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