Beyond the dark souks of the old city, beyond the Dome of the Rock
gray and humped and haunted, beyond the eyes of the men at the café
where they drink their thimblesful of hot tea, beyond the valley
with its scar of naked pipe, the perfect geometrical arcs of irrigation,
and someone incising a dark furrow in a field, some plowman’s black
gutter opening through the green, she is waist deep in this open grave,
staring at the delicate puzzle of my feet. Beyond her, in the shadow
of Tel el-Hesi, daubing and dampening the earth, another woman finds
the faint brickwork of floor spidering the dust, on the hearth’s
wedge-shaped arc of shadows a scattering of charred millet.
Nothing else for miles. Nothing but this bluff of ruin,
one decapitated tower, one “window” staved into the brick,
the bougainvillea crawling across a wall dragging its little bloody rags.
She is standing here thinking she cannot bear the way this foot—
my foot—wants to step out of the earth. I don’t care. I am using her
to leave the grave. And so we go on. We go on until we cannot go on
deepening my grave, and the trowel hits stone and I lie staring
while she makes the earth recede, reaches in and pulls me out,
my jaw wired shut by roots, my skull so full of dirt that suddenly
the intricate sutures come loose and, in her hands, the whole head opens.
In the shallow setting where I lay is the small triangular sail
of a scapula, the ribs like the grill of a car. She bones me like a fish.
She lays the little pieces, the puzzling odds and ends, into the dishes
of shellac and formalin. One carpal still wears the faint blue
stain of a ring. Wearily, I lean my reassembled head,
sutures rich with glue, against the wall of the filled beaker.
A fine sweat of bubbles on my chin. All night, through the window
of my jar, I watch her men with glue and wire, the shallow
saucer of my pelvis. We are nothing. Earth staring at earth.