The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Sherry Horowitz

DIG

She found him kneeling in the fields, digging
past sundown--next to the plow blade, now stuck
between the rows of seed--
wet from rain      and the mud streaked on his face
in long lines     ran down his arms
turned thick on his fingers where he clawed the dirt

Beside him lay a pile of brick and clay shard
remains from a parapet of a tower    or a jug
rich for a golden soup     she would later make
would feed the children      in a small steaming kitchen
whose roof   so many years later   was now
high above the level of the sea

The old heavy bones in his fingers slipped
like tumblers in the yielding earth
to find an urn    splintered planks of a bed-frame
or the brittle tibia of a once slender leg
crumbled to dust in the plow of his palm
as a chrysalis disintegrates      after it’s abandoned
the air free of life-sound      muffled
by a pelting palm striking the dirt
fistfuls flung in staccato    a heavy beat of dead-noise

He arched and struck
as if hacking wood with an ax
the chill air lit his puffs of breath
the moonglow     lit a glitter on his wet forehead
and the gold band on his finger
leapt in the dark like a small flame
but the only sound     was a dampened bat
a woman might make to rid her rugs of dust
as she beat them on a high rooftop

the same blood beating now in his rib
in her temples   in her chest     quickened by his sight,
the same pummel of a thousand catapults
that might have rained burning bushels
       of tar on a golden city
that slumbers now    scattered    broken fists
and drums   that no longer pound     lie crushed
and leave behind a sifted slurry      of ash and bone

 
WICK