T. R. Hummer

Dried beans in a muslin sack, tied shut with greasy string. An ounce of ginger root to brew digestif, Procured on physician's advice from an "Oriental" grocer at remarkable expense, desiccated now almost Past recognition. Half a pound of sowbelly wrapped in cheesecloth. Hard cheese. A licorice twist. A box of sugar cubes to meliorate bitter tea—with these you could construct a model of the odd granite tomb He insisted on for his own final habitation. There in his beloved Camden he rests in a blank box. You may count there twelve thoracic vertebrae, two lunate bones, two trapeziums, a coccyx, And all the rest, to the final mystic number two hundred and six. His book is a homemade Bible. His tomb is a homemade Blake. Here is the skull-cup that held the brain his doctors lifted. He was the catalog of his perfect body. In love with health, He ate grim food. Behold his ounce of flour, cut with weevils. Behold his dried orange peel, studded with a sorry clove. This pantry is a compost now. It is small; it contains millipedes. The bottom shelf reveals this lunar dust, a Kosmos in it Writ in groceries.Here, as he never said. I hold it toward you.

Of ox and luncheon tongue, six hundred pounds; of Wiltshire bacon, seven-tenths of a ton. Seventeen hundred miles they walked, and it was pony meat that saved them. But one biscuit, this one Of thousands, baked by Huntley & Palmers, a special formulation fortified with milk protein, survives—the men Long dead, and the ponies, whose lives flew through Bullet holes easily over the frozen labyrinth of the Fortuna Glacier, all gone to powder. Found a century later in the wrecked Larder of one of Shackleton's way stations, it remains perfectly nutritious, and sold at a Christie's auction Is worth a thousand-some sterling.We had seen God in His splendors; we had reached the naked soul of man, He wrote. And:This biscuit, said a Christie's director, is an object that really catches the imagination.

Along a derelict railroad, abandoned machinery takes its last tour of duty toward rust. Another town is stalling. Another house smolders with rot while a television rages. Crows patrol banked cinders beside a landfill with a sign: No Dumping. We were Jews in Austria. No, we spoke German in Czechoslovakia—by order of the Alliance, we filed Into a railroad car and died. No, we were black in Arkansas. Here is a filthy contraption, like a grim lawn mower With flanged iron wheels,Pandrol Jackson in blue paint on its rotted housing: a rail grinder, used to polish steel To brilliance, forgotten here as after the Rapture. And the carcass of a boxcar warps just down the track, groaning with a cargo of bones.