Museum at the Tomb of the Unknowns
Kate Fox

I. Ruins

One last, crazy Latin breath,
then all of Pompeii’s remaining citizenry,
dogs, too, are caught in the act.  And who wouldn’t
be petrified, given the slow lava of years
that suddenly rises up and rains down on us
with the certainty of Tuesday, that middle child
of Norse decent, our bodies
preserved like the imprint
of a trilobite, its ribcage
the hollow crib of our last breath
taken in amazement
when almost without notice,
what is considered most solid turns to dust,
consumes us, then reveals
us, two thousand years later,
foetal and asleep.

II. Archives

Or shoveling bread into ovens,
or looking at the sky
as if to gauge the weather,
as if this could go on day after day,
newscast after newscast, a mother
whose failing sight compels her
to pull her grown son to a halt
by the roadside, pointing to a graveyard
in the distance.  See?  See there?  she tells him.
Those are the rooftops of my village.
Or the letter from Gustav Mohr: The Masai
have reported… the many times…
they have seen lions on Finch-Hatton’s grave,
and Dinesen’s calm reply,
I must remember to tell him.

III. Mausoleum

Precious little, yet enough, clouds
like swept flour on a slate blue floor,
leaves, their reflection in the pond,
small pillows for those
who can make their bed in water
easily as breathing, which we cannot,
having traded ourselves for the headboards
farther beyond, blankets of fresh earth
rising like cake, then falling
along the pillars, this edifice pushing us
beyond endurance, beyond despair,
until at last we can bear the entire weight

of someone else’s body on our own,
pine flooring weathered to gray,
an earthen pitcher with its potential of flowers,
even a woodcut over our heads, cream white
and pewter blue, that, from one angle,
could be boughs of cedar heaped with snow,
and from another, the vast flap
of laundry, shirts filled with embrace.

Gone now, what we had called belonging,
those furnishings in the appliqueed dark
the intertwining sculpture of roses in the carpet,
the accordion fold of a lampshade that,
if called upon, might tell us this was your life:
this candle, this adz, these jars
washed to mellow blue, part of a landscape
we thought could never change,
its only motive eloquence.