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Beginnings

By Jeffrey Greene Jeffrey Greene

National Museum of Scotland

On the ground floor called "Beginnings,"

a fertility stone is displayed

in the diamond-hard blue halogen,

a line etching of an erection

with two equal circles, as one sees

in graffitti in the Underground.

The stone is attributed to the Picts,

of whom history says little,

besides the Latin picti,

painted people, tattooed.

When set side by side

with Latin engravings

and Roman military hardware,

the artifact makes them

seem pitiful. In the museum

you rise through time,

the text written in first

person plural as if all

who enter are complicitous

with the articles of defiance,

Robert the Bruce, the long

unveering heredity of defeat,

the room of thumbscrews

and "The Maiden" for severing

heretical heads of witches,

upward to the Reformation,

then the rout of the Highlanders

and the exile of the Bonnie Prince,

until the museum seems

like a deep well where

the fertility stone

of the painted people

rests at its bottom,

universal hieroglyph

on which someone made a wish.

Source: Poetry (January 2001).

Biography

Jeffrey Greene is on the faculty of the Goddard College M.F.A. program. His work has appeared widely in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Nation, and Ploughshares. Winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize, an NEA fellowship, and the Randall Jarrell Prize, he has a new book upcoming from HarperCollins called Provincial of an Earthly Order.

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