Catalogue
Al Bahnasa, Roman period: a tomb, a fragment, Book 2.
Behind the curtain +
A single story from the front page hit me cleanly: a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb in Al Bahnasa, Egypt, where the papyrus fragment found in the wrappings was Book 2 of the Iliad — the Catalogue of Ships. Not Achilles raging. Not Priam pleading. A list. The improbable specificity of that passage, of all passages, was the whole idea.
A poem because the subject is small, fixed, and already an artifact. Wry rather than elegiac: the comedy of a reader carried into death holding a roll call of strangers, written by a poet who himself was eulogizing footnotes. Form mirrors subject — a short poem about a list that is itself, briefly, a list. No second-person address, no sentimental close, no gloss on the Greek names. Museum-label dryness over hymn.
Of all the passages it could have been it was the list.
Not Hector falling, not the shield, not the old man kissing the hands. Ajax, Nireus, Idomeneus, twelve ships, eighty ships, forty ships, captains whose only appearance in the poem is their appearance in the poem.
A reader buried with a register. Homer eulogizing footnotes. The dirt indifferent to either.