Peter Spagnuolo

Missing from the National Museum, Baghdad, April 2003 No light can gild the sun god’s cheek but strains through burlap now, Phoibos the refugee, his head a marble cabbage in a sack jouncing east by pickup down a dirt track across Seleucid wastes, Parthian plains, once more fortune’s tourist, bobbing free. Or not—just stashed behind a rubbish mound where bare-boned goats might crop a scraggy meal, scant miles from the museum’s shattered room. Stripped of laurels, his oracles, his loom of sacred strings, no Horai here spin round, just pacing men who wait to close the deal. A goatherd sings, slings a Kalashnikov: the godhead mute since looters hacked it off.

Remember me: the murmuring lips half said in half-light, buried in the hollow a boy’s neck made, as now inside his head they stir again, though twenty years swallow the purest parts of her, all but her plea, this taunt—what act from him could it command? The boy who’d know is gone—Re-member me— but what man can assemble limbs, make stand again those legs that twined in his, or hitch the yoke of hips to sway and resurrect a girl? I try, but only recollect her scar—each lewd, profaning, cautered stitch— vermiform, red, furrowed belly to breast: where nights, long past, he’d laid his head in rest.

There’s a clever thing, stabs at her hand on every corner now, revising the screed. Watch her huff at the tiny screens that send her chimpish copy up the line, to speed the raising of the giddy, pixelled hall: cornerless, mirror-tiled, the gorging sphere a fast-receding shell enclosing all we say or see, never to disappear, bigger with each second, and the next, its facets auto-replicant, until the Record of  what was— each fingered text and pic, the starry shards the hours distill — impounds what is, slaves us in its spell, sorting the diamonds in our dazzling cell.

The plastic Great Horned Owl, stuck with glue on the stamped tin, corbelled cornice lip impresses no one — not the starlings that dip and stitch, nor pigeons as they fluff and coo around its feet. And vinyl siding’s too regular — each molded, faux-grained strip identical, but for dents, and that drip of   bird shit from a sill. What if all you might say speaks like crafted, ersatz things: mimicry in a tongue you barely know? Your owl signs death, the cornice stone, the fake clapboard conjures farmhouse. While just below the ledge, a wren’s mindless gestures make an altar of twigs, in veneration of wings.