Two Poems

Red Slipware, Italian,
c. first century BC

The palm-sized dish, still coated –
no, encrusted! – with the scale    
of some minor, long untenanted village,    
does not offer the hoped-for gossip
about the stranger who buried it,
the exotic disease carried by the Cretan rower; 

cannot provide the pet name of the citizen
who fingered from it – not lark’s tongues,
the slipware too modest – or of the scheming
handmaiden who served him, a slave, of course,
and treated lavishly only in departure
from the lavish; cannot whisper the sins

of the humpbacked potter who turned it
on his wheel (scars still inscribed
...