What Tolstoy and Paleopathologists Have in Common

by Mary Buchinger

In the dissection
and study of a mummy,
the richest store of history
lies not in its cracked leather skin
nor in its fringes of straw hair

but in the coprolites
—the dried clumps
of ancient shit
in its lower gut—

just as the best stories
of old economies and trade,
climates and plagues are told

by the archeology of garbage pits
and kitchen midden mounds,
with their broken pots
and desiccated coffee grounds.

Tolstoy knew this too,
how what happens
is what no one wills,

how inertia and momentum
bubble up unpredictably
from a soup of
minutiae and mass,

how each bit of dirt
pushed up by insects
from the hardened core,
each pore’s excretion,
each bit of breath or word,

is a pair of wings—
    what is cast off
    says everything.

 

Mary Buchinger holds a PhD in applied linguistics and is assistant professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. She recently won the New England Poetry Club’s 2005 Daniel Varoujan Award, judged by Marge Piercy. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, The Cortland Review, Re)verb, Facets, Penumbra, and The Heat City Review. (10/2005).