Brenda Yates
The Etruscan Fire Poker
They left no literature to give account of themselves, no epics
to explain beginnings,
no noisy voices of change. Fragments of a language that can be read
but not understood, survive on tablet and tomb: cartouche,
inventory, inscription for
a deceased about whom nothing is known. Though often spoken of
by
other names or lumped with Phoenicians, we have no record of their
response.
Nothing either when Greeks said: …hedonistic…unmanly!… and
took offence at
parties where, lolling on couches, respectable females, even
wives, drank,
spoke and listened to music beside men. Or when Romans
disparaged their art:
popular baubles …knick-knacks…but kept without comment
the funeral sacrifices, gladiatorial games, rigid hierarchy, and of
course, the arches.
Rasenna, they called themselves, and probably the place they
lived as well, but
origins are uncertain, no clearer than how or why they disappeared.
Artifacts show borrowed myths, renamed gods, added twists, spice,
sex, depicting
copulation, threesomes, Aphrodite naked, Apollo striding in strange
see-through gown. Demons were blue and beaked, distinctly their
own—precisely
the color, it was said, of blue-black flies that feast on rotten
meat. Sphinxes and
supernatural beasts indicate belief in an after-life, but not what
they feared, nor why hut-urns that had for generations held the
bones and ashes of
their dead, became elaborate miniature houses in street after
street of a necropolis on the out-skirts of town. But
compelled as we are to make
stories, objects are never lifeless for long. Among the
jumbled remnants of the dead,
there are carvings and bronzes: statesmen, gods, warriors,
women with delicate necks, next to fibula, elegant helmet, earring,
wine cup, hairpin,
sarcophagus with smiling, reclining couple.
And there are desires, rendered in crude clay: fat, sexual
fetishes, wishful phalluses
and bellies swollen with dreamed-of babies. And the mundane:
braziers, bowls,
mirrors, platters, jars, beside the not-so-ordinary, like a
wrought-iron fire poker ending in the shape of a narrow, delicate
hand. Elongated
fingers curl beneath the resting thumb and the graceful
extended index (ready for prodding coals), whimsy that needs no
language.
My husband punctures the hush, laughing at a joke 3,000 years
dead.
*
Weeks later, we happen on a documentary about the deaf. A child
is filmed as his
cochlear implant is activated. He sits in his mother’s lap, playing
with his hands. Someone speaks to him. Apprehension passes
over his face like a
bright cloud, and he turns, eyes lit—toward the sound—knowing
this something he’s never heard is a human voice, beckoning through
the silence.
Brenda Yates is from nowhere. Having grown up on military bases
here and abroad, she now lives and works in Los Angeles. Her poems
have appeared in Eclipse, Pearl, 51%, Cider
Press Review, Spillway, Blue Arc West and So
Luminous The Wildflowers, An Anthology of California Poets. She
was the recipient of the 2005 Patricia Bibby Memorial Scholarship at
Idyllwild Arts and is one of five co-editors reading for an
upcoming anthology entitled: Off Base: Poetry of the Military
Brat Experience.