I move constrained by the shape of my jar in a kind of crouch, my elbows on my knees, my knees on a line with my ears. Weightless, I still adhere to the ground. At first I waddled through the leaves of trees but found such progress absurd. I went up toward the clouds. O Hercules, what loneliness, what devastation, what fear! I like the open road, especially stationing myself on a bridge. I try to talk to donkeys, not knowing what to say.
Nor is it congenial to go downward into the earth. I first ventured a well. Then I went down to where iron grows. Down past root seines in loam like condered oakgall and down past yellow marl hard with quartz the splintered ores begin. Green, edged, with the black metal smell horses hate and wine sours next to, and which thunder has entered. Chill, sacred iron, bitter with lightning. Stay away. It is not human. It is from the beyond, from up, the stuff of the moon and cold stars. It is down, the pit is iron. It neither breathes nor moves. The gods own it but it is not a god. Pity is not in it.
I have thrust myself into a sunflower and washed in its basil green. Near deep iron I have shuddered and gone numb.
Like a snake I take my warmth from the world. I make none of my own. This godstuff I’m of is not by Hercules flesh. It is a kind of air, but more organized and articulate. There is the ghost of a bunion on the ball of my left foot, the soldier’s corn, where we pivot. Though I feel, there is no seriousness to it, as in a dream. The ride of a wasp through my eyes, rain through my arms, wheat awns combing my bowels, all I meet in my flow swims through me as easily as a fish.
But things do not always get to me or I to them. I stream across geese to a wall and find myself in a country I have never seen, the brick hives of Chaldea mayhap, Indus fowls bright as flowers in the streets.
I nod in a cowstall, liking the straw and dried pease. I wake by a river, near a skiff, an old Tiber herm brown with time, baskets. I exist without continuity. While squatting in a wine vat I am suddenly on board the Hecate sailing for Marsala. And in my urn all the while.
WE ARE DIGGING a canal across Greece, through rock, the depth of a mountain’s height.
If you have never swung a pickaxe, brother, never been chained ankle to ankle, you know no more than a child what’s ahead of you.
The canal is to connect the bay of Corinth and the Saronicus and be a path from the Adriatic to the Ionian. God knows when they began it, some centuries ago judging by my first look, and Rome will be as old as the world itself when it is finished, if it is finished.
Greece! I would have taken this place to be Africa. Corinth is somewhere over there, they say, a separate city from the Acrocorinth, on a hill, sacred to the slut Aphrodite.
Flies, shit, sweat rancid as a whiff of billy goat, fatigue as deep in the bone as water in the sea.
There is a kind of exhilaration in having lost all, once the anguish subsides. Once the anguish subsides.
We are chained ankle to ankle, and to each other. My fellow to the left is a Scythian who lives off fury. He eats his beans like a wolf, he scoops clay when he can get at it and eats that too. He prays to strange gods.
My fellow to the right is Roman enough, but dead. I tell him that they have our bodies only, not our souls, but he stares at me as if I were a lunatic.
To want nothing, I tell him, is freedom, to will nothing is death. He wills nothing. He wants his freedom, still, and his soul is sick with that lust. It is a terrible want that adds to the weight of the pick, thickens fatigue, mixes rage with mere despair.
We sleep in our filth, unconscious as soon as they order us to lie down. And we rise while we are still asleep, and drink swill, and go off under the lashes to the rockface. It takes them awhile to unchain the dead, and it is harder on us, in both spirit and body, to drag a corpse in the chains. Yesterday we dragged poor Mnescus half the morning before the crew with the files and snippers could get around to us.
The third or fourth swing of the pick and he died standing, his tongue out like a mouthful of sponge, his eyes rolled back white, his old knees trembling like a wet dog.
After you’ve had your fill of horrors, they cease to burn. There is to be nothing else, after all. It rains, we work in mud. We are grateful for the difference. The beans are sometimes black rather than red. New prisoners arrive, and we are avid to learn why they are here.
The horns, the long horns blare, and we are off in our chains, morning after morning. Yeorgi, three down to the left, will probably die before the day is out. I’ve looked my look at the son of a bitch of a guard when they had us out at the crack of dawn, meaning that if he had the featherweight of a man in him, he would take Yeorgi out of the gang, spitting blood as he was, fever in his eyes.
The guidons were up, no man might speak. The horns, the old sergeants who had frozen their balls on the Rhine and roasted them in the Oxus held their dignity under the standards, the drums, and the shouting in our
