Antiquities

Crossing a field I heard something underfoot and bent to see a square stone and
more forming a forgotten road remembered
    by some travelers one hundred years ago.

Travelers one hundred years ago who had the foresight and romance enough
to respectfully clear away the meadow grass
    and map the stone markers.

Here the road neither ended nor began but maybe fell in the middle of some
great dynasty that owned this field once and those
    who toiled here under a godlike sun.

And now it’s a land of passing stone memorials, remains for scholars and folks
like me that find all these references a comfort,
    gathering at and sagging bookshelves.

But this old road—where could it have led that it finds the need to be anciently
forgotten?  Surely it must’ve been a grand byway
    once full of clatter and dust.

Yes, and truly if I stop to listen I can hear the thunderous march in that constant
race against the rising and setting of suns
be they b******s or not,

Can see the dust plume rising and following like an ensnared monster caught
and brought to some conquered village
    to mythologize their nightmares of the time;

Looking east there was nothing but tall grass and crowded thin woodland that
offered no clue; looking west there was
    much the same.

The t-shirt seller in the village said I might find something of note out here.
As I paid she said the old fields through which
    the centurions passed

haven’t changed in a thousand years but have grown to cover this one road,
one of many, she said, that lead anciently away;
    I thanked her for the shirt.

Though forgotten in this time of immediateness old roads like painted t-shirts
lead somewhere—to salvation armies and
    to those marching across the movie screens;

would they have built it then if they knew that their lives would be so
fictionalized in the millennia to come?
    This damn t-shirt is too tight.

The past is a lovely distraction to which we compare the present; and when
they find the Pegasus farm owned by some
    long lost tribe of old-tongued nobles,

then maybe these fable roads and olive tree avenues will be cleared for
travelers slow like me; maybe then in books
    tt will be rightly understood what may’ve happened here.