Alibi
from "The Guides" section of Guide School
What they did about losing the Byzantine well under it the mosque under it the fountainhead from before Roman times. The Israeli Antiquities Authorities cannot save it
What you did about being blame, losing your house, under it the cellar stocked with food for winter, the samovar passed for generations, your profession as a baker when they cut off your hands and put them in your oven
Collate
In which century-country were you
excavations of assembly

Collate. Or be found guilty
If you were not there, what is your alibi?

If you were there how could you lose the fountainhead from which, some say, water still springs

Your hands, which still reach for the glass
which subterranean pre-Roman water table fed the fountain?
which fulfills the double necessity
to flee and produce a replica of stability
layered in schist and clay
traceable as a mosque covering a fountainhead
Sift from the four midrashic levels. The first P’shat, the hand brushing. Remez, the second, a shard refers. The third, Drash, speaks the question the shard asks. Sod, the fourth, air curriculum
echo eastern direction

Byzantine Mediterranean or Aegean
Any wells, olive trees, terraced fields
Where any
go and do not land

land and

are required

to not come from

Aspire to be a National Heritage site, abandoned ruin, town rebuilt as a medieval fortress
Compose yourself as a site we can visit
Become a tour or papers and salary will be withheld
the Antiquity authorities cannot save
their job, like yours, and that of the guides to
enlist epoxy

supply pedigree

evidence pardon
archaeologist brigades patrol federal family
festivals of national security
Dug up the said carries the gravity of the already said Just like you recognizable only by document Professional pariah, transient Sayer slip between the accounts to dislodge “...the heart of the state at which language has become static...” -Ouaknin
Said be unsaid to accuse the listening eye
requite visitation
and its reciprocation
requirement:
vigorous leverage incursion Rogue guide
disguised divulge syllabus deviations
in walking shoes

feasts on the unfamiliar
sated on proof
and barefoot

the starved, accused
Defibrillate

seizure skewered on the inert
Cairn kill quandary

said the told who told the told
Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings), (Nightboat). Gevirtz works with Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration as a writing mentor to incarcerated people. In2004 she and Siarita Kouka, Greek poet/restorer of maritime antiquities, founded the Paros Symposium, an annual translation and conversation meeting of Greek andAnglophone poets. She is based in San Francisco.