Rethink.

Why I Came
Nomi Stone

Djerba, Tunisia

Under amber, the nearly lost
city: I dream myself
here, to enter how I imag­ine
we had once lived, until our cities
were paved over, stones
from our graves laid
in the new city’s walls.

I came because here,
amber flooded and
cooled over the homes, over
hands bless­ing can­dles inside.
And breath from the lost
cities kept mov­ing in liv­ing
throats.

Com­ment:

“I dream” / “I imag­ine” / “I came” — self-knowledge is had through what is other; “we” occurs once, as part of “had once lived.” The char­ac­ter of this self-knowledge is pecu­liar: “the nearly lost city” — in both time and space this city was lost. Our speaker is near to it per­haps, but it was cov­ered by amber. Cer­tainly oth­ers had missed it. And we need not men­tion how much time has lapsed since the city was active.

“I dream myself here / to enter how I imag­ine:” the speaker is three times removed from the phys­i­cal real­ity of the place. She must dream her­self “there;” she is only enter­ing where she has located her­self; where she will enter is what she imag­ined. To what degree is “we” a con­struct of one’s own mind? To what degree is the attempt to recover the past only a fur­ther obscur­ing of it?

Still. “We” seems to be a guard of sorts against “them:” “until our cities / were paved over, stones / from our graves laid / in the new city’s walls.” “They” were explic­itly impe­r­ial; cities were just a means, reducible to roads, need­ing per­pet­ual updat­ing. More impor­tantly, the past was sac­ri­ficed for the present: graves were turned into walls.

The dif­fer­ence between us and them turns out to be “I.” Dream­ing allowed our speaker to travel; imag­in­ing accessed a past dif­fer­ent from lit­eral his­tory, the build­ing of roads and walls. The speaker now steps forth, but it is not nec­es­sar­ily a lit­eral step for­ward. She artic­u­lates a rea­son for being here:

amber flooded and
cooled over the homes, over
hands bless­ing can­dles inside.
And breath from the lost
cities kept mov­ing in liv­ing
throats.

The same amber that obscured the “nearly lost city” pre­served it. Per­haps this was a tragic answer to the most per­sonal of prayers and hopes, that “we” sur­vive. Other hands had paved over cities, built walls from graves; per­haps the dif­fer­ence between “us” and “them” con­sists in a same­ness — we want the same thing. The quiet cre­ation of light parts amber for “breath.” The air had moved the amber before, but that same air is moved now.

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