unwilling objects: coins, pieces of shrapnel,
slivers of amethyst or glass, green as unripe figs
—Invisible scenes break off in the 1m × 1m excavation pits,
microcosms never to be known again, absolved of meaning—
Every now and then we find a few copper weights
the color of dried blood buried near the foundation walls—
What comes to be reaches the end of nowhere,
tucked into cloth bags and mailed home.
Further west, the cardo stretches like a vertebra
toward the Orontes. We walk its length,
the tesserae chipped into loose mosaics under our feet.
Mirage—we glide along the river. We see how far as from.
Columns lean like weary sentinels and the past,
peeled off, exposed to light, rustles all across
the sand, insectbrittle, lichenedged. We weigh time
by the grooves carved into the walls, what we’d point to
as the reasons we wouldn’t mistake the ordering of. This is not
this is never far off. The silence on the plateau rings louder than war,
our mouths taste like gravel and we can trace a kind of grit in the air,
wavering faintly, as if the earth was still catching its breath.
