I have to tell you
there is something very old about me.
Norman used to say,
there’s an ancient Greek
living inside of you. Sure.
But he said that to everyone.
When I feel connected across
time and space, something is
firing in my mind. A spray of
flowers bursting across the forehead
like lights. The spearmint prick
of bilateral stimulation. Norman
said, she’s so serious. We just discuss the poems
and then she rushes out. But I was just
awkward. It feels anachronistic
to use email or to speak face to face.
What a person’s face does to me.
The quality of watching and being watched
all the way down into the earth, the eyes
pressing you in. Like a piece of a clay pot
or a parchment fragment, I will someday
be disinterred. It won’t be pleasant.
Most of what’s in museums, we have to remember
as we look, was stolen from someone, after all.
If not a single person, a people. An obelisk
whose hieroglyphs were intact for thousands of years
in Alexandria erodes in just two hundred when
transported to London. Maybe I wasn’t meant
to be here, specifically. My marks too obscure
and they love a baby face, pure of symbols.
This, a place, a culture, hostile to iconography.
Like I’m cloaked in sand, I wear it off me.