Amateur Archaeology

Amateur Archeology                                                     

I am not good

with names.  But nameless you walked toward me

And I knew you, a swelling in the heart,

A silence in the heart, the wild wind-blown grass

Burning—as the sun falls below the earth—

brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow.

                                                                                Elegy

                                                                                Brigit Pegeen Kelly

When we didn’t know any better

and would go about bare-foot, or when

we were just trying to run away from her

we’d take to the edge

of the woods and pick through the bushes

and play in the old family

dump.  Digging with a sharp broken rake

the short handle eventually scraping my hand

raw, I’d draw the red teeth over the gelatinous 

(but only after rain) dirt and expose the lives

of all my relatives who lived

here, who shared their water and

coffee, who scooped lard

out of the tin bucket on the counter

by the stove and watched it melt

again and maybe say: isn’t that one

unfussy, if it doesn't sputter? Heat, it is a

liquid, rest and cool it is raw, shoat-clod solid,

and watch, all the use before it: donuts

mostly, flecks peppering it that rest on

the bottom of the Dutch oven, like flecks

in this family dump: the broken Noxzema

jars mostly (who dipped into it?

the mirror first before bed, who with a cool

white face-
cloth swept the day away from her

and cooled it even

more, the white Noxzema in the white

jar, or maybe it was some other cheap
beauty cream, and now here it is with all the rest

of the trash, remains in a graveyard I want

to dig in even today, the way some archeologist

would: grid by grid, and dig and brush,

and my field notes would say more than:  one broken

white porcelain jar.  I’d pull it all

with a mortician’s hand and today say: lady’s

button maybe the top-most, designed to clasp

at the neck for catching the eye of a man

at church.  Or: several bottles of still

lidded paregoric, rust stains almost blotting

out “may be habit-forming”.  And for all

the unbroken, there would be
bottle after bottle broken, as though in furious
stroke someone swept them

into a laundry basket or a coal bucket, it could’ve

been a coal bucket, and tipped it completely

over, ignoring or deliberately not looking

back at the woman in the dirt where a clothes-

line is today (it was set back after the house

burned down and they brought up another one).

She's slumped, given out, she's glass on glass 

sounding up out of the ground as she fell in, 

and time being

what it is, the safest rake and hoe, and winter

too, and snow, it’s all covered over waiting

to be exposed, to be known again, to be

pitied, though for whom depends, doesn’t it,

on the time of day, on being purged

of arrogance. . . ti depends on a lot

more than that but rgith now I can’t say what,

other than to be kept distracted, simply

by digging, just digging.