![[What They Were Building…]](https://thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/5428199672_e5b9f562f6_m.jpg)
A fine kettle of fish, an ancient Mesopotamia
unearthed anew. Mystic cities, the press
of fertile crescents,
thighs wide like to lay seed in. Literal rivers.
By YANG JIAN
He was old.
She, too, was old.
Their years, like lightning, slit the heart of the passerby.
By MO FEI
Booming, spring shoves open the door,
Blocks of ice wash down the river.
While some people stay in youth,
Some regret and grow old.
from The Pocket Encyclopedia of Revolutionary Violence, for the Years 1066-2092, vol 1, entry 1
The weir-trap is set. Iron stakes pounded into the bed of the saltmarsh arc from the blacksoil into the shallow reeds, straw crosshatching the stakes,
a water-net for the sprats and silver pike, eels, and the marshcray hunched among the reedbone husks in the mud.
Death is easier
than love. And true feeling, as someone said,
leaves no memory. Or else memory
replaces the past, which we know
never promised to be true.
Dampness and sunshine
are equally fatal. Jackets fade, mildew
gathers. Whatever you wipe away
will surely return.
That was one idea my mother
always disliked. She preferred her god
to be reasonable, like Emerson or Thoreau
without their stranger moments.
Memories are an act of creation. We piece them together from disparate fragments and imaginings until it feels like that’s how we always remembered it.
I’m a young boy, seven or eight, and I’m holding the red cord attached to the corner of the coffin as the men lower it into the grave. Around me an overbearing huddle of black and grey woolen coats, men with leather gloves and sombre Sunday-best hats: women go to the Kirk, but not the cemetery. I am trying to reconcile the pale wooden coffin with my grandmother, who, I am told, is inside it.
If I should tell you they come to this place,
those who’d written out their lying lives, that they move
languidly yet deft like butterflies, one by one they come,
a movement in the penumbra, each with a shimmering
shield or carapace on the back stretching from neck
to the fold of the knees,
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