told him to feel no fear.
“If this messenger stung you,
Fox, as it stung me, you’d see
courage snares the heart,
binds the foot, blinds the eye.
Better to live in the lonely glen
than be a brave fool and die.”
The Net and the Fish
The big ones stay in
and the little ones swim,
what’s glory in a frying-pan
compared to the living fin?
The Horse and the Ass
The burden you refuse
becomes the weight you bear,
the horse that scorned the ass
wears the whole pack
he refused to share.
The Fox on Fire
To punish the thief of the vines,
the farmer dipped in tallow the tail
and lit it on fire. But the fox in his fear
ran straight through the fields.
Now the threshing floor has no piled grain,
and the crop is cinder and ash.
The Nightingale and the Swallow
By singing in the dark the same song
They recognized each other—
The nightingale and the swallow.
“Come live with me under the eaves
and lessen with song the load of men
who till the earth to live.” “My song
is a torment I sing alone, the desert rock
echoes it, and the morning dew that cures
thirst is now my humble home.”
Some poems of Sappho’s found in the winding cloth around the body found in the sarcophagus. A poem of Catallus’s printed on thick vellum found, claret-stained, plugging the bunghole of a tun of wine. Ancient manuscripts discovered in bookshelves kept in tombs, reading for the afterlife, there with the jars of sealed honey and the mirrors of polished bronze.
Bees used to be thought psychopomps, traveling between the living and dead, gathering pollen, dancing their dances, and if you put a poem up next to your ear and wait patiently, sometimes you can hear in it the whole hive still buzzing.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe that’s a lie.
These poems were found in a cell with a bench carved from the same stone that formed the walls. You can imagine the cell as a single chamber of a honeycomb, hexagonal, scented by honey that left, like tears, traces where down the wall it dripped. Outside the cell was Law—where Law used to be. There they sentenced a man to death for creating new gods and corrupting the youth. He wrote poems to pass the time, and these poems are those, here for the first time printed. All the casual reader won’t be able to appreciate is the paper itself the poems were written on. Dark gray and the ink barely darker. And, held up to the light, a faint watermark drawn by hand of a bee in flight.
Ignorance not enough, but to be aware of ignorance without ending it. To know that you do not know. Can it be more than a riddle? To know and also not know what you know. To live within it as one would live within a plot. I don’t mean a narrative. I mean a small space just big enough for your body, a square of grass, a grave.
As a child I helped my grandfather tend the graves. The pinecones fell from the trees he’d planted with his grandfather, and though half lamed by polio, he and I would walk the outer edge of the cemetery picking up the cones and throwing them in the dented metal pail. The oldest stone belongs to General John Cantine, who kept his eye on the Iroquois nation during the Revolutionary War. The land was deeded to him as a governmental thanks. Almost effaced from the stone, the date remains legible: 1806. Behind the stones of all the veterans I placed small American flags for Memorial Day and the Day of Independence. It’s how I got to know some of the dead. Others I knew because one day I would join them. The Quick plot, a column carved on each of its four sides, including poor Lettie, who died falling from a train as it went into a tunnel on the way to New York City. She wanted to see the inauguration of the Statue of Liberty. No one knows if she jumped or if she was pushed. She just “fell.”
Fell into a different liberty than she might have imagined. Liberty beneath the ground.
Fell from an
Excursion train to NY
& was killed at
Musconetcong tunnel
Oct. 25, 1886
I’d look at the stone and think, Here I am, here’s my land.
Robert Pogue Harrison writes: “Let me put forward a premise here to the effect that humanity is not a species (Homo sapiens is a species); it is a way of being mortal and relating to the dead. To be human means above all to bury.” He goes on to quote from Vico’s New Science: “Humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, burying.” We become human by maintaining our relation not to death, but to the dead whose fortune it is to be located in death. Maybe that’s not right. Death doesn’t have a place, and so we must make one for it. All you need is a shovel, and some dirt. Some fire, and a box. Anything hollow can be an urn. Even your cupped hands for a little while will do. Until they have to learn to bury themselves.
Thoreau writes: “My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills.” Let his instinct suggest that the head is a tool for digging, and that one of the more unexpected results of thinking hard is that you’ve dug a grave on the page that may or may not be your own.
We don’t know exactly who it is we’re digging the grave for. There’s just the command singing in the air: dig.
