it seems important to remember,
How were you called? It will not
come. Your name was to last forever,
but here on this field of death, your
memory has not lasted even an hour
after your departure to that cold
place, across that dark river.
That river crossed but once. Your
name did not last forever—not even an hour.
I see ravens landing nearby. They
hop about, turning their heads sideways
to fix their black eye on a fallen soldier
twisted nearby. A bold, big-breasted
storm crow hops upon the armored chest
of that fallen comrade, and with a clever
twist removes a bit of lip from an empty
face that no longer needs to smile.
I look down, trying once more to recall
that appellation that will restore your
memory to my mind and to the Gods’
as well. But alas, forgotten one, it will
not come. The general signals. We must
move on. Rumors of another force
approaching mean we will not pause
to burn you and do you one last honor.
Your body will go to these harbingers
of death. These feathered eaters of death.
These markers and signifiers of death. I
pick up your short sword, its tang wrapped in
hardened olive wood and stiff ox hide.
It is in better shape than mine, which I
stab into the ground next to your body,
and sheath your blade as my own.
Our names were to be remembered forever.
Commemorated for deeds worthy of songs.
Epic poems were to be spoken of our Areté
at games and sacrifices. But the wind stirs me
to wander on, to collect with other survivors to
the place we are gathering to march into
another fight, and on and on in an endless
cycle of battles played out in a theater
enacted for the amusement of the gods.
As I walk away, I try once more to remember
your name. But it is gone and I will try no more.
Your bones will dry here.
Unmarked. Unmourned. Forsaken.
II. The Battle for Tissaphernes’ Head
I once watched a gull and a raven
battle over Tissaphernes’ head.
It was loosened by the deep strike of
a cavalryman’s spear to his uncovered
throat and kicked fully free by the errant
hoof of a staggering warhorse. I watched his helm
bounce among the stones of the strand. His
head lodged between two barnacle-graced
stones. One eye was open, the other closed
and his curly locks falling fetchingly around his
face, in a handsome and stylish way. He would
have turned heads in Athens were it
still attached. The gull arrived first. Its white
and gray body balanced atop his head seemed
in a strange way to honor him with its calls,
as if hailing, “Come! Come! Come! Behold, here
wedged between two rocks, is Tissaphernes’ head.
Come! Come! Come! Honor him.” The raven
arrived a few minutes later. She landed on a
nearby bit of drift wood appearing at first uncaring,
preening indifferently. Then with deft quickness
she leapt in a bound to his perch and plucked from
Tissaphernes his open eye. Oh, how that gull
screeched at this audacity. And so it began.
Why these two fought so over this bit of property
only Athena knows, for there were many fallen
comrades among the rocks of low tide, and their
flesh was there for the taking. But on and on
they fought. Feints, thrusts, attacks, retreats, bold
ventures, stealthy maneuvers, and both false and
true strikes. Many feathers were lost, both black
and gray, leaving patches of white and red.
Tissaphernes’ ears were the spoils of
the raven. The lips and one cheek were won by
the gull. Long after their bellies were full they
fought on. Neither willing to yield to satiety, or
reason. At last I had to leave them to their
conflict for it was time to form ranks and
take the road to our next conflict, where we ourselves
would fight on, for land, for glory, and for the Empire.
As I made my way up the guarding cliffs, I could
not help but check my bare arms and naked legs
for missing feathers, and other things lost for
reasons ungiven as we marched into the
growing darkness of night, to join the same dance
as this vain skirmish for Tissaphernes’ Head.
III. Departure
On the bright morning of my desertion,
I saw a Greek bearing three babies
upon the shaft of his iron-tipped spear. He held
them over his shoulder light and easy
as if carrying them to market like so
many sedge ducks. I watched from the roof
of a merchant’s house, on a balcony rich
in verdant vines. I had sacked twelve cities
and had taken my share of spoils, but those
dark-haired Persian nurslings skewered
as if for roasting, turned my stomach sour
and emptied my heart of manhood. Of rage.
Of battle lust. The city is now awash in flames
and screams. Cries of passion and anguish.
As one of the conquerors, I walk from
the broken gates unmolested to the tents
from which we had lain siege for four months
and six days until the walls were at last breached.
The camp followers ask for news,
bivouac and take the woman I won at
dice from a minor king of a minor island
and bid her walk before me. Three woman
demanded to know where we are going and cry out
“He is running!” And so I am. But there is
no one to fear, all are gone mad as the city is razed,
bloodied and raped and we walk out. I now forgo
empire. Foreswearing citizenship. And in doing so
leave behind my farm and olive trees and
the wife that bore me two daughters and who
I have not seen in seven years. She thinks me
dead, I have no doubt, if she remembers me at all.
And so I am dead. I will go east. To a land
of mysteries. A land where I spoil nothing
more. Where war and death will not find me.
Where babies bawl and are fed mother’s milk.
IV. Travelers (I and my wife standing next to each other)
We join a caravan You join a caravan
Me as mercenary You as mercenary
You as my wife Me as your prisoner
The camels stink The camels remind me of home
The air is dry The air is dry
The flies relentless The flies relentless
We head east We head away from home
To a new land To a foreign land
Away from war Away from war
A red sun shimmering A sunset red aglow
I speak of the farm You speak of pasture
Along a river Along a river
Where such sunsets Where such sunsets
Will grace the day Will grace the day
And we will sing
Well-fed goats Goats
Will give us milk and meat Milk? And meat?
And make our children strong Children? Strong?
Once I had a wife Once I was a wife
She was well-favored To a blacksmith in the city
She bore me two daughters I bore him two daughters
I left her to fight He was killed by Greeks
For what? For what?
Now all is gone Now all is gone
No daughters No daughters
No homeland No city
Only this sword Only ravens
He made me laugh
He is cruel and kind
He is Greek! Never!
It is night and in the firelight In the firelight
I hear the bark of jackals The noise of the wilderness
They draw near Quiets me
A thousand stars A thousand stars
Ignite a sky Whisper changes
Portending life Portending life
V. Storm Crows Uncalled
You lean against the table and hold your expanding belly.
they wave and our daughter yells something
I cannot make out. You ask if I want some cheese
speaking our new tongue, the language of this
land—using vowels that emerge windy and round
from the verdant wet air that hangs heavy after
the summer monsoons. I assent, and you cut off
a piece white and thick. You pour the juice of
a melon into cup fashioned from the pale clay found
downriver a bit. I drink and hand it back to you.
You finish it. We have many neighbors
skin black and hair long and straight unlike
the tight curls of an Ethiopian I met in Corinth
many years ago. They welcomed us here and
asked no questions. They taught us how to
care for goats. How to plant grain. These are
they who will gather tonight to sing and dance
because the rains have come and gone and we
are still here. Floods have been abated and we
must honor the gods that make it so. Soldiers
pass here from time to time, long speared and
fierce. Warriors of kings whose palaces dot
this strange land, but they bother us not at
all but go to and fro on business of which I
have no interest. I tell my wife and children
to hide and I bow my head like the others
and lean hard upon my hoe and let them pass.
I like to imagine sometimes they stop to harass
and I pull from under my bed my iron-tipped spear,
and my hoplite short sword, and my curved
shield and let the soldier hidden in my breast
burst out, to find again the scent of blood that brings
the storm crows from the clouds. But I look at my
fair Persian wife, and those she has born me, and I
smile. And remember the words of the mendicant
who stayed with us a night and taught me that life is
suffering, and that in letting go of the past I can
move to better cycles of birth and rebirth. But I say this:
If this moment alone is all there is as my father taught.
It is enough.
Guess whose light shined through the eyes of my Persian wife?
Often I was afflicted with an idle curiosity I had no way to satisfy. I’d lived the life of numerous musicians and now understood much about the fine art of music. A musical ability never graced my original life, but now I could play thousands of instruments. But could I really? I would never be allowed to actually play. Someone else’s hands always do the work. I can feel the pressure on the strings of a guitar, or holes lining a flute, or even my hands dancing on the keys of a piano. I lived entire lives as a master player, and yet they are not my hands.
If I were released would these talents remain? I’d like to think so. For example, I find myself anticipating the next note, knowing exactly how my hands would fly into the next position. I have practiced this within my host thousands of times and so know how to play, what I imagine, is with the same expertise as she in whom I dwelt. While I am lost in the music, it feels as if I am leaping to my next sequence of notes. But it is not, at least not in any way I can control, for if I try to move differently or improvise, nothing happens of course.
There were some people I inhabited who had little freedom. I remember a homeless man. A veteran ruined from saran gas in the Gulf War. He had grown nearly mindless from years of inebriation. He dressed in rags. Even so, each day, dirty and homeless he did one thing that was truly free: He chose a flower from a woman who sold them from a small booth tucked into an alley, which he wore in his hat as he begged for coins to purchase sustenance and drink. His one act of freedom was to choose a flower. Freedom, it appears, can be lost and gained.
Enough. There is no end to these stories. I must move more quickly. To give you details about my life as a Neanderthal or small bipedal apes would become tedious. As I left humans and other semi-rational creatures behind, freedom shrank. I spent a lifetime as a small ape. Then reptiles, whose minds were calm and languid. I would descend lineages and then climb back up them, so from a certain bird-hipped lizard, I would ascend the taxonomic lineage to become every bird (I even saw myself many times from the perspective of a robin or a house sparrow). Down I descended until a fish I became, and on down the chain until I was then a worm-like segmented creature, then small bacteria. My lives were short in such creatures, and the change from one to another involved little differentiation. Were I ever to go mad, it would have been here. My shadow persona blipping in and out of billions upon billions of incarnations of these nearly identical creatures. I was exposed to a staccato of consciousness flashes as I moved among these fellow travelers. But I learned a way of being that helped me through these tedious years that made existence possible. I will explain in a moment.
Were I to tell you of the nearly endless blades of grass or the forests of trees and shrubs I became, you would likely shriek in horror. Yet it was a time of calmness and it seemed to me that the eons rolled past rather pleasantly. I rested from the jostling existential noise of being a rational creature.
Isabeau, far down the chain of life where consciousness largely disappeared, became an ambient kind of glow. Not that I could see, but feel. Isabeau followed me here below.
Then I saw it coming. I had moved down the great chain of life so far, until one day I realized that I was moving through a population of single-celled organisms very rapidly. The population was getting smaller with each generation. Signaling that in all the Earth there were only around a thousand of these primitive cells, then the population reduced to a few hundred. Suddenly there were only sixteen, and since my life span was only a few hours I realized it must be the end for me! The point where life began, where the population narrowed to just two, then one. I was about to be released. I had been placed in everyone and everything that had ever lived. Untold billions of humans. Trillions and trillions of plants and animals. So many. So, so many. It was coming to an end. If I had had eyes, they would have filled with the tears of a thousand oceans! I would be free! At last, it was over. How many eons had passed since I started this Hell? I could not fathom it.
Then there were eight cells. On all the earth there were only eight cells.
Four.
Two. (Here. At the end. When there were only two. I sensed Isabeau beaming in the aspect of the other primitive cell.)
One.
I had only a few hours to think about what I had been through before this cell died. Then I would be free. Suddenly I was overcome by the realization that Isabeau was with me. I was able to apprehend her in a way I never had before. We were in the same being. For an instant we were aware of each other intimately, however, we had been non-rational for so long as single-celled organisms that words did not come easily during the short existen
ce of the cell we were in.
If I could have found voice, I would have pled to know which of all women I had been though the nearly infinite eons, was she. But my voice had been silent too long. Still, we basked in each other’s presence. I was excited. I had imagined the moment I would depart Hell. I thought when this happened I would engage in a meditation on the enormity and complexity of the lives I had lived. But, here at the end, I was with Isabeau, and a wild cry of joy erupted as I contemplated meeting her in a few minutes. I could feel her excitement too. I was too distracted to contemplate on this Hell—there would be plenty of time to do so in the eternities of paradise that lay ahead. I was now in a cell driven completely by my chemical makeup. A strange, carboxyl group had joined my chemical machinery that allowed a copy of what I was, allowing this form to create a new copy of itself that would detach and be born new in the world I had known a few minutes ago. I began to divide. It was over. This was it. I was leaving.
I was enclosed in something. Like the mummy bag I described earlier, inducing the familiar panic. I started to struggle. Wiggling frantically to escape from this prison. My host, too, was panicked and terrified. Together, we thrashed about in alarm. I did not understand. I had been every animal on Earth and the closest that had come to this experience was as a baby lizard trying to escape from a leathery ovum, or the baby bird’s desire to escape its hard-shelled egg by pecking its way out. Then it hit me. A realization. An inescapable logic poured over me. I had been every form of life that ever lived on Earth . I had not been this. I was not on Earth. Despair flowed over me, overwhelming me. I wanted oblivion more than anything imaginable. Was I somewhere in the galaxy I knew? Or a far distant one? At least on Earth I had some scope of the task before me. What awaited me now I could not guess. I was lost in time and space.