Only slightly different phrasing from that cartooned or captioned
on shards and collectible fragments, the amphora of shrewd curators,
depicting battles and shipwrecks from an earlier chapter, disaster
calmly painted in a cool, a saltwhite workroom. Where a horse
gallops past an empty tent, a dune and line of surf in erotic juxtaposition.
The deranged patience of a slave girl, stretched far out from the
wall of the strangled city and pointing to what, when the vase is turned
to the left, shows us a single trireme, frozen upon a gaudy wave.
Like the opening of a vast epic, details attributed to the traumatized
eye-witness but disputed with the shifting care of the anatomist,
less interested in effect than inventory. Coriflage of human flesh,
held aloft above the leaping, breakers of lace upon the hunting dogs,
baying for a scrappy chunk of gore. The sea bounding in green praise,
wave upon wave upon wave that moves along the base of the circular fragment,
fragment that could be anything or nothing to the untrained eye:
victory bowl, mourning cistern, night-watchman’s spittoon.