POETRY BY TONY BARNSTONE
ANCIENT GREEK URN COVERED
WITH SHELLS,
swollen with barnacles,
pulled from the sand's suck.
For centuries, the sea clothed the clay with shells.
Who could imagine this urn would surface on the other side
of time, grotesque and
beautiful?
I rinse it off in the surf,
buff it with a beach towel,
hoping perhaps the past will spill like a genie
from this long-stemmed neck and delicate lip.
Alexis shouts and lobs
rocks at a bobbing water bottle,
gashing its plastic belly till it folds beneath a wave
and sinks through a world suspended—blue cool dream
where clear plastic bags
slip like jellyfish.
Perhaps in a hundred years
a boy will dive here
and pick through food tins bearded
with seaweed, empty as hunger.
When he shoots to the surface, his fingers
will grasp the neck of
what used to be
our water bottle. Will
he open it hoping
to find a note inside, or does he take the bottle
as the message? He'll wipe it off, guess
the brand name, then toss the bottle back, bad catch,
into the ocean of discarded
things.
What good is it to make
these stories up?
The bottle rolls on the ocean floor or slips
into a fisher's net with a catch of tuna.
And I still come back to
this urn,
pocked with the dried body cavities
of molluscs whose names I could never guess:
limpet, sea butterfly,
nudibranch, chiton.
Dead now. Scoured
with salt and sun,
their white bone ears hear nothing.
Their thousand mouths are open.
Karavi
Beach, Serifos, Greece
* * *
THE CAT WHO LIVED IN THE WINE CELLAR
we'd converted into a spare
bedroom
had torn through the screen and leapt
to the rim of the ancient
urn below the high window
then down to the lip of the old stone oven
and from there lightly to the floor.
It must have made our summer
home
its wintering den to escape the cold rain
and the villagers with poison and sticks.
But when I forced open
the stuck door
and stepped in I saw just dust
and webs and thousands of black rat
turds and the clay urn overturned
and broken into two jagged pieces—
it must have teetered and crashed as the cat
leapt off, so the cat was trapped
inside the dark stone room
and that's where I found
it,
behind the mattress tilted against a chair
so as not to mildew, curled into
the mosquito net, so long dead
and mummified the waterless body
had flattened into a relief of a cat, just hair
tufting off dried flesh and fanged skull.
The rat turds, swept up,
turned out
to be the husks of wall grubs, who must
have feasted on the corpse in thousands
and been in turn caught and webbed
and poisoned and slung and drained
by the hanging spiders.
And for a while in the
dark where the cat
clawed light fixtures out of the wall
and screamed and mewed and curled up
at last to dream its last life off
there was a kind of order here,
though not a kind order,
and there were great feasts all through
the cold dank black winter
until I came in with broom
and detergent
and sunlight and nudged the corpse
into a plastic bag with the broom handle
and killed the spiders and swept up
the bug husks and scrubbed at the dark
cat-shaped stain on the floor
until everything came off except a black
impression of the tail.
And I had electricity and
mops.
And in the wine cellar where the cat
had lived I put the music on extra loud
and tried to put what happened out of mind.
And the stench flew out the windows.
And I soaked the net in bleach.
And I washed my hands three times.
And I put everything back into order,
the kind of order I could live with.
Ano Hora,
Serifos, Greece
Tony Barnstone is Associate
Professor of creative writing and English at
Whittier College. His first book of poetry, Impure, a
finalist for the
Walt Whitman Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the National
Poetry
Series Prize, and other national literary competitions, appeared with
the
University Press of Florida in 1999. His other books include
Out of the
Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry, Laughing Lost in the Mountains:
Selected Poems of Wang Wei, The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese
Masters, Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and (forthcoming)
The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor Books).
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