sewn paper
Poetry
April 2000
94 pages
ISBN 0-88984-211-6
$12.95
Photo by Roger Hallett
Kurgan No. 10
Here on this endless steppe the burial mounds seem
slow sails on a flat sea. Keep staring
and you'll know they're stalled. Almost all were
plundered, big surprise, long ago, passing Cossacks or
the local tomb-fanciers have had close on
two thousand years to disturb these peaces -
the only puzzle is how no. 10 escaped them.
But escape them it did, until now. They
must have been tipped off, warned off,
a thin and mephitic smoke wavering forth
from nos. 9 and 11 maybe, deaths of diggers,
a famous malediction. Whatever the reason,
she survived - saving herself for the standard
bright immensities ahead, perhaps -
saving herself, I have improperly, basely,
surmised, for me. When we opened
the square pit of her precocious sleep
the gold about her head startled us. It was
a sort of diadem-cum-headdress, and
the gold-foil stags and birds and trees
rippled in that first air as though
not just stags and birds and trees were
shaking stillness off but she too was
testing her delicate bones - as though
everything we had rudely uncovered here
knew that a long lull was ending.
She was Sarmatian, probably a princess,
and young. About twenty, the consensus was.
Her neck was encircled by a rigid collar
of chiselled gold, ornamented with a series
of unknown magical creatures -
dragons fighting against what seemed to be
monkeys wearing armour and holding clubs.
Towards the front of the collar was, in
the words of our historian/curator, `one of those
works of art which, once seen, carry out a small
but irreversible coup in the mind' -
in less lapidary terms, a man, cross-legged
and golden-bearded, of serene aspect,
holding a cup in his two hands, certainly
interesting (and shortly thereafter the approved
subject of a doctoral thesis in Rostov and
a less-ambitious work by one of my own
students at the Institute) but `not quite',
as our Director remarked while gazing
inexactly towards the historian/curator
over lunch, `Rilke's archaic Apollo'. I'm sure
they'll work it out. As for that coup, I disagreed
only in the detail. That tableau so unsparingly
vivant as she lies down, again and again, involuntarily,
on her back, is a loop running incessantly
over my pages, running now as I write this,
lights and shadows over the text, and I have
not the smallest idea how to stop it. I have
walked this plain a hundred times, a thousand,
since I was named to this post, tending
my inconsequential thoughts and staring
at the stalled fleet, the paused convoy -
and all the while `the poor princess', as they
have begun to call her, was waiting. Waiting
to give me her treasure, waiting to give me
the enigma of her life and especially of her
death (a darkness I may spend the rest
of my own life in close engagement with),
and at the end, when there was nothing else,
waiting to give me what was left of
her twenty-year-old body. What to do
with such Sehnsucht? I may have become
irreversibly hers.
There was a mention
of delicate bones. Not quite all her bones
were there. Some of the very most delicate
fingertip bones, called phalanges, were missing.
Archaeologists are divided on this: some believe
that the phalanges are commonly gnawed off
and removed by mice not long after the burial,
this is the problem, they say, with chambered
graves without coffins. Others maintain
that the fingertips were ritually severed
immediately after death, the purpose of this
being to ensure that the living will not have to
fear the touch of the dead.
It's this last one I would choose.
I couldn't bear the idea of the mice.
_______
Sehnsucht: longing (German)