Museum Piece, and: Canicule Marilyn Hacker (bio) Museum Piece Beirut Once, Phoenician triremes stood in harbour,poised for merchant journeys of exploration.Honey, wine, gems, dyes for a purple tunic,scarabs and daggers. There were artefacts in the small museumon the campus nobody ever came to—goddess statues, bracelets, rings, swords, toy wagons,Tadmor tomb portraits, lively, saddened faces, a bit of makeup.A clay hippopotamus, painted azure:toy or minor deity? The explosionundid curators' care as it did doctors', grandfathers', mothers'.But the feral cats, who survived, as alwaysbask in light, millennial, the debris ofAugust around them. [End Page 17] Canicule A rainy Monday, everything is shut.It could be late October; it's mid-May.Lights on at noon, outside, rain drums on graypaving stones, drainpipes, voices. Nothing butwater on roof tiles in a steady beat,the postman's motorcycle passing by,not stopping. Tomorrow, the bakery,grocer, butcher—bread, vegetables, meat,revivifying possibilityof a "bonjour' exchanged with an unknownperson, whose eyes express the smile,question, mistrust or curiosityher or his face mask almost hides, as Iexhale uneasily behind my own. Exhale uneasily. Behind my ownpretense of standing firmly, I'm unsteadyon my feet, impatient but unreadyto take one more step, toward some overgrownweed-wilded plot. Leaden feet weigh me downon the empty morning street. Ahead, Isee the post office, clock tower. I buy bread. Ibuy a bunch of red onions. The townis quiet as the plague that got its clawsinto the blue-green globe a year ago.Queasily accustomed to the lawsthat change monthly, the shops shuttered because . . .I make my way, awkwardly lame and slow,up sloping streets out of DiChirico. Up sloping streets out of DiChirico,too clean, too empty, garrulous grans indoors, [End Page 18] kids quiet, holiday-rental visitorsquarantined in cities, the status quois stasis. Now, here, stays here and now:curfew, a trajectory that blursthe border of the ten kilometresallowed beyond the door. Today, tomorrow,something will change, the wind, the rules, the weather,a numbness, swelling, or suspicious cough.Yesterday, in late sunlight, on an off-road, a brown horse stood in a field,flanks aglow in the slant light, untetheredand shimmering in a stasis that seemed wild. Shimmering in a stasis that seems wild,unseasonable, unpredictableas thunderstorms or canicule in April,the certainty of change. There was a tiledcorridor; the amputated, undefiledtorso of a boy in stippled marble;a bird that cawed, that whistled, one that warbled;a sketch of an old man reading, sketch of a childherself bending to draw a hopscotch gridnear the gazebo on the village square.I sat on a bench there. I thought of Claireeighty-two years ago—a similarvillage, the same grid, during the drôle de guerre,not thinking she'd write about it. But she did. Not thinking he'd write about it, still, he did,first scribbling birdtracks on a yellow linedpad—place-names, objects left behind,in his three languages. He stopped in mid-phrase (they weren't sentences) as a word fled,or was it the object, shimmering in mind,but disappearing, shrinking to a blindspot with a velvet aura. He shook his head,rubbed his eyes, squinting, put down the pen, [End Page 19] light pricking them like summer dust that stings.Beyond the window, a street full of thingsin motion, even when they were still.That wasn't the road leading out of TellAbyad, that he was walking on again, Walking out of the ruined town again,having gone back to probe the rubble, lookfor what was left of the school, the mosque, the book-shop, where after school daily eight or tenchildren would awkwardly appear, and listento tales they'd coax from him—he shook,despite himself. Here was the souk,or had been. No man'ouche, no heaps of greenand russet vegetables, no polyesterdjellabas, no men, no women, no mercantilepalaver, only an urban vacant lot,cardboard boxes, dogshit, a scrawny cat,and plastic...
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Jun 24, 2024
Evgeniy S Danilov 
Open Access