Sarah Lindsay

Elizabeth Bishop leaned on a table, it cracked, both fell to the floor. A gesture gone sadly awry. This was close to fact and quickly became symbolic, bound to occur in Florida, where she was surrounded by rotting abundance and greedy insects. One moment a laughing smile, a graceful hand alighting on solid furniture, a casual shift of weight, the next, undignified splayed legs. The shell of the table proved to be stuffed with termite eggs. True, it was a fall from no great height— merely the height of herself, and although the hollowed-out table failed, at least the floor held, though probably infested by termites as well, and possibly built on a latent sinkhole, how can you tell? And how could she, smiling and easy, arm moving without forethought and permission, have forgotten fear, apparently let go of a hard-learned lesson? Enter a room as though it is strange. What you recognize may have changed, or may change without warning. Trees fall in hurricanes and on windless mornings, breaching houses where people you knew have vanished or died or stopped loving you.

Of Mina-sarpilili-anda II, the only surviving record is this splendid bas-relief in which he presses the neck of his Hittite foe beneath one battle-shod foot while minions shoulder the spoils of a conquered city. In fact there was no war that year; a bored stone-carver was looking for preferment. He received an allowance of good wine. In a perfumed cloud of dust that loitered over the plain, Hittite ambassadors came to the king with golden bells and rosewater candy, birds in cages and spotted cats, and departed in peace. The king was beloved, laughed often, feared nothing, and died in his bed of poison. A carnelian image of his second-best wife, accurate to the last mole, was plucked from the dirt by a boy tending goats, sold, and spirited out of the country, rolled in a rug, on a ship that sank on a cloudless day. An image of his first wife, in chrysoprase, lies tightly packed in buried rubble for the next generation of archaeologists— should they prove worthy, persistent, and slyer than goatherds.

Tell the bees. They require news of the house; they must know, lest they sicken from the gap between their ignorance and our grief. Speak in a whisper. Tie a black swatch to a stick and attach the stick to their hive. From the fortress of casseroles and desserts built in the kitchen these past few weeks as though hunger were the enemy, remove a slice of cake and lay it where they can slowly draw it in, making a mournful sound. And tell the fly that has knocked on the window all day. Tell the redbird that rammed the glass from outside and stands too dazed to go. Tell the grass, though it's already guessed, and the ground clenched in furrows; tell the water you spill on the ground, then all the water will know. And the last shrunken pearl of snow in its hiding place. Tell the blighted elms, and the young oaks we plant instead. The water bug, while it scribbles a hundred lines that dissolve behind it. The lichen, while it etches deeper its single rune. The boulders, letting their fissures widen, the pebbles, which have no more to lose, the hills—they will be slightly smaller, as always, when the bees fly out tomorrow to look for sweetness and find their way because nothing else has changed.

For RLB Pass by the showy rose, blabbing open, suckling a shiny beetle; pass by the changeless diamond that falls asleep in shadow— this love is a lichen, alga and fungus made one fleck, feeding on what it feeds, growing slightly faster than stone into a patch of gray lace, a double thumbprint, its bloom distinguishable, with practice, from its dormant phase, crocheting its singular habit over time, a faithful stain bound to its home, etching on the unmoved rock the only rune it knows.

They have left behind the established cave with its well-worn floor. Scholarship impels them in hundreds, but generally one by one, to find an unknown passage or scrape out their own. Proto-Semitic linguistic theory, Hittite stratigraphic anomalies, microclimatic economics. "What do you see?" invisible followers ask in their ears, and they whisper "Wonderful things" as they quarry a grain of rock at a time, or examine a fleck of ore, or measure the acidity of a trickle of water. See! Behold! Look! Lo! they cry in season, rapt, in love, chipping away with their pocketknives, pencils, rulers, fingernails, but some have tunneled so narrowly and deep that those behind see nothing but slivers of light around an excavator's haunches. A battered piece of a tablet is all that remains of the so-called Singer of Nab. Circa 1200 BCE, he impressed, or had impressed, some words in clay. He may have composed a religious hymn, praise to the king, a poem of love, an inventory of cattle. (He may have been she, but this is unlikely.) The lines we have could be the beginning or the middle; there may have been ten more, or hundreds. The word before this gap, in fact, means "hundreds." Hundreds led in battle, hundreds slain? A thousand times beloved, nine hundred sheep? And the standard translation of this word, here, is either "desire" or "need." But did he write of a boundless yearning, or mercantile requirements? Was he a "singer"? The scholars who care disagree. Look at them, crouched in a long tunnel dug by means of argument over an antique syntax, warming their hands at a chunk of brick baked maybe in the time of the Trojan War, broken some moment between then and now— peering at it with penlights, squandering eyesight. They know they may crawl out hungry, mumbling, aged and gray, clutching a secret message of small import or nothing, nothing. They seem lost. They seem happy.

She's slicing ripe white peaches into the Tony the Tiger bowl and dropping slivers for the dog poised vibrating by her foot to stop their fall when she spots it, camouflaged, a glimmer and then full on— happiness, plashing blunt soft wings inside her as if it wants to escape again.

When bones and flesh have finished their business together, we lay them carefully, in positions they’re willing to keep, and cover them over. Their eyes and ours won’t meet anymore. We hope. It’s one of the oldest rules we mostly follow. In the deep Stone Age in Shanidar, now Iraq, someone or all of them laid or threw on the grandfather’s chest whatever was blooming— St. Barnaby’s thistle, yarrow, hollyhock... His was their only burial before the frost. For millennia, then, the dead might go under with thistle, quantities of red ocher, a chunk of meat. Now we have everlasting bouquets of plastic; now we have hundreds a day to bag and box and pickle to re-cross the Atlantic. Light a row of oil wells and kneel on sand too much embroiled for tombs. Regrettably, something of the smell is of bodies suddenly buried in fallen stones. But some is incense, pinches of pulverized Baghdad rising in ceremonial smoke: dust of combatants, onlookers, miscellaneous limbs, contents of hovels, contents of museums, ancient pollen of yarrow and hollyhock.

From the Mithridatic Wars,  first century BC Our general was elsewhere, but we drowned. While he rested, he shipped us home with the bulk of  his spoils that had weighed his army down. The thrashing storm that caught us cracked the hulls and made us offerings to the sea floor — a rain of statues, gold, and men. Released from service, done with war, the crash and hiss muted, we fell through streams of creatures whose lives were their purpose. We settled with treasure looted from temples of rubbled Athenian Greece; among us, bronze and marble gods and goddesses moored without grace, dodged by incurious fish. Their power was never meant to buoy us — our pleasures were incidental gifts — but, shaken by their radiance in our dust, we had given them our voices. Their faces, wings, and limbs lie here with our sanded bones and motionless devices. Little crabs attempt to don rings set with agate and amethyst, and many an octopus, seeking an hour of rest, finds shelter in our brain-cases. So we are still of use.

The dog came back, grinning and smelling of carrion, and her husband behind it, stride and gestures too large for the house. His field voice, cracking, declared a wider kingdom, and the name of a fallen city, not theirs this time. From outside the roar and shrill of celebration poured in. He drew near in a rank cloud, breathing hard, to show her the gash in his thumb. So she washed in five waters and went to their bed, but he slept without moving, still in his cloak and dust.

Krakatau split with a blinding noise and raised from gutted, steaming rock a pulverized black sky, over water walls that swiftly fell on Java and Sumatra. Fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam, the last known member of Equus quagga, the southernmost subspecies of zebra, died. Most of the wild ones, not wild enough, grazing near the Cape of Good Hope, had been shot and skinned and roasted by white hunters. When a spider walked on cooling Krakatau's skin, no quagga walked anywhere. While seeds pitched by long winds onto newborn fields burst open and rooted, perhaps some thistle flourished on the quagga's discarded innards. The fractured island greened and hummed again; handsome zebras tossed their heads in zoos, on hired safari plains. Who needs to hear a quagga's voice? Or see the warm hide twitch away a fly, see the neck turn, curving its cream and chestnut stripes that run down to plain dark haunches and plain white legs? A kind of horse. Less picturesque than a dodo. Still, we mourn what we mourn. Even if, when it sank to its irreplaceable knees, when its unique throat closed behind a sigh, no dust rose to redden a whole year's sunsets, no one unwittingly busy two thousand miles away jumped at the sound, no ashes rained on ships in the merciless sea.