who, unlike so many of the other statues
missing arms, legs, hands, and cocks,
appears to have been sawed through at her iliac crests,
the wing-like portion of the pelvis,
the hips on which she could, if she had them, rest her hands.
Were she not stone, the mess — the stench of her —
would be unbearable. For her sake and mine I’m glad for her bloodless quiet,
her mutilation so long passed that the bright paint
that once adorned her is only visible under a microscope.
Edges that should be rough are smooth, as if she’d melted,
consuming herself as candles do. I love the airy fullness of the museum
in which she sits. The high-ceilinged rooms where light
goes from bright to filtered to almost night. Here, I’m nowhere and everywhere
at once, surrounded by things that belong only to each other,
belong outside of the time I marvel in.
Hygieia’s feet are missing. A serpent entwines her legs.
Each scale is half the size of my palm. The thick coil spills over her lap,
climbing her phantom torso like a sun-hungry vine until it reaches
its own headless end. Hygieia, the goddess of health,
acquired a cult following after a plague killed one quarter of the population,
including Pericles, which cost Athens the Peloponnesian war.
Hygieia, the daughter of Asclepius, the god of medicine,
who was sliced from his mortal mother’s dead body. Hearing stories like these
during a time like this, I think grief is the most sacred form of love.
Yet, to avoid it, to protect those I cherish,
I’d do almost anything—people once traveled to Hygieia’s temple
in Pergamon, shaved their heads in offering,
purged themselves in the temple of her father, let snakes
slither their bodies while they lay in the dark drugged, hypnotized, praying
for a vision or a cure. Some claim grief is a teacher. Maybe.
But only long after we’re gone. All I know is, here, absence
surrounds me like artifacts buried with the dead
to teach them how to live again. To Hygieia’s right sits an urn,
a blue, translucent vase once used as a water jug. The cremated remains
glimmer with rainbows caught in the uneven mouth-blown glass.
In the next room, a funerary crown, the gold oak leaves
and acorns untarnished, thin as paper. Beyond the crown,
a pair of oversized eyes suspended in a glass case. Crafted for a statue,
the eyelashes are thick, mostly black with a slight patina of verdigris.
Despite pockmarks in the frit glaze coating the marble scleras
and the quartz irises, the obsidian pupils stare intently up
to meet the eyes of whoever walks by.
When I gaze into them, time retreats then rushes forward
as waves tethered invisibly to the moon.
Among all the stone, glass, and gold, my body feels
momentary, predictive, like air smells before snow falls.
A smell that stimulates the part of the brain
meant for mint, or other spices the earthen vessels once contained.
A smell that’s as difficult to describe as Hygieia’s missing face
in this city suddenly missing so many faces—
those who died, those who are dying, even as I walk back
through rooms filled with what grief teaches us about nations
who rise under one god only to fall under another.
Behind me, the stone eyes unblinking since
the 5th century, stare down the next stranger. The half-severed serpent
winds a little tighter around Hygieia’s partial form. Grief becomes history,
becomes the body I’m pushing through the museum’s
heavy bronze doors into the distant lament of sirens.
5th Avenue is empty. The sky blues then golds.
The smell of snow breaks around me.