The Sunday Poem: Wandering Near Nazca
The following is a true story from my childhood in Peru, except that the incident didn’t happen near the Nazca lines — I don’t recall if it happened on a trip to Ica or just out in the desert on the outskirts of Lima.
Wandering Near Nazca
I saw them at the horizon.
There in the beige limitless plains,
While walking on the Nazca Lines.
The drawings were too large to be seen,
And at first I mistook the bones for
Another mound of whitened rocks:
Another dot of an eye staring back at the moon.
The knob of the femur looked like a rock,
Sand crusted on its side,
Ruining the graceful curve the arch
Of bone made. Digging with my hands
I cleared sand and clumsy
Pebbles away, until the skeleton
Emerged from its blanket of earth. Long tibia
And small skull — it was a slender girl,
I thought, her ribs slanting over the dirt
And enclosing it, burying her spine.
I brushed the dust from the corners of her eyes
And lifted her piece by piece into the sun.
Carrying the bones to the museum
I imagined bones swaying
Like the grass I saw nowhere around me.
The museum said:
He was killed by a lance.
A dead soldier.
We find them often.
A grower of hemp and collector of guano.
Keep him if you like.
We here have an embarrassment of bones.
So the bones went into the back yard,
Where dogs chewed them until I grew ashamed.
I held them close to my eyes, tracing porous
Cavities, the crinkled lips of joints,
The gathering of sand, then
Dropped them into the dumpster.
There’s something about living in a place where not just the history, but the past lives and deaths are immediate — and more, common, dirt-common. It puts a very different perspective on who we are, and what we leave behind, and how much respect the universe accords us, and how much respect we accord each other.
Pretty close to my neighborhood in Lima, not far from the first building I went to elementary school in, there in Lima, there was a thousand-year-old pyramid. A small one, hidden by the suburban trees, mostly. Picture that being three blocks from your house. What’s more, it suffered the fate of everything that is close and familiar: nobody went. The curator was pathetically happy to have a school tour group come through. The pyramid was full of bees, and the soil within the enclosure was rocky desert, a reminder that it was the suburb around us that was temporary, artificial, and doomed to vanish.
Much of the U.S. simply isn’t old enough to have this sort of history laying around. Even our battlefields have been sanitized: picked over by collectors of Civil War memorabilia, turned into careful clean parks. Looking around this country, save for tended preserves full of orderly crosses, you’d never think that battles had ever come to this soil.
I wrote the first draft of this in April of 1990, so it is itself a bit of an artifact left by history. As I look at the original, I see that the genders and roles were reversed, and the meaning was quite different; in that draft, I found the bones of a soldier, and it was the museum that said,
Just about fourteen, a girl,
such remains are found
all over the world
of sand outside, on the ground.
So it was instead a poem that argued the opposite case; a different form of romanticizing history, in effect. It concluded, back then:
Liars.
The girl I found was not common.
She saw love and sex and wars,
birth and death. She was a woman.
But museums can’t see what she was.
I dug a grave. I buried my friend.
I did not place a cross.
I do not want her found again
to find her dignity lost.
I wonder which is the more honest acceptance of our history: to carefully tend the bones in shrines and memorials, granting them the respect and dignity of a live lived and then lost; or to accept that they build the very earth beneath us and are nothing but the by-product of history, meant to be discarded.
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