An Archaeology of Wods

Mound Digger
Sarah Lindsay

This mound of dirt and the summer are hers to transfer
from what lies before to what lies behind,
pinch by pinch. Of the mound, she keeps a record.
The point, the students have been assured,
is not to find objects. Their object is
to understand the ground.
What water did with it, when.
How often earthworms combed and cast it.
Whether it was tilled, or thrust aside,
which seeds lay in it, which pollens settled.

When it's too dark to dig, she makes a tent
of reading assignments. A chapter on similarities
between spear points unearthed in Virginia
and Solutrean points in Spain,
both kinds wrought as though for beauty
and cached in heaps of red ocher. Another book
invites her to peer at the keyhole shape of a bone
the size of her index finger, engraved
these ten thousand years with forty strokes--
fourteen, eight, eleven, then seven--and polished.

A tally, a game, the score?
We'll never know. And here's a review
of arguments about a broken rock
that might have been bashed into useful shape
deliberately, with another rock,
by some ancient original axe-making biped,
or might be a geofact, a tease,
a found axe--or no tool at all.
She douses the light
and all the words disappear.

Morning, back to the mound. It's two mounds now;
she knows it halfway through, its wayward layers,
silky and barren or matted with nutrients,
heavy clay, a thousand shades of brown.
She sees it with her eyes shut, with her palms,
sometimes tastes it. Leave the flints and bones
to thrill-seekers and visionaries.
Dirt answers her questions. She has dug past
any props or plots or characters
to the stuff all stories walk on.