T.J. Gillespie“I was listening to a song the other the day that made me think of you,”
She said with her hand stretched out the open car window,
Turning and bending in the strong currents of air
Like the neck of some imperious bird.
“Did you ever hear of the Scythian empire?
I am not sure if it was real or the kind of romantic name
That sounds better in the lyrics of pop songs
Than it ever did in the pages of history.”
My first thoughts were to the obvious
Temples and tombs along the turbulent Tiber
When Rome roared west through Gaul,
North along the Rhine, and sexed its way to Egypt.
My memories moved across the Aegean to Greek fires,
The mad Macedonian on the march
Followed by phalanges of hoppolites, spear tip to spear.
Next came the proud Persians, the persistent Parthians,
Helmeted Hittite horsemen and the hungry Huns.
There are the names we know: the healer Hamurabi, the hero Xerxes,
Augustus and Attila, one the harbinger of pax,
The other a scourge come hot from hell.
There are the tribes, too, the catalog of conquest:
The Mayura of India, the Han of China,
The doomed dynasties of Aztecs and Incas,
The Byzantines, the Franks and Carolingians,
Ottomans, Mongols, Babylonians.
All had their time, but that time is past.
What of the truly vanquished, the forgotten,
Those whose names have crumbled into dust or sunk away into mud,
Those who slipped into shadow as the sun set on their cities?
Haven’t the poets already lamented our hubris,
Mocked our brazen ignorance and pitied the men
Who’ve faded away into obscurity like Ozymandias
Or been buried in bogs like Heaney’s Tollund Man?
Her long left arm, braceleted and brown,
Keeping the beat, moving in time to the car radio,
Waves like a bejeweled maiden from another time.
She was found frozen, recumbent,
As if still asleep, girdled in gold,
Beset in a pleasure chamber,
Pale flesh, preserved in permafrost,
Purpled with pictures
Of spotted cats and bears and wolves.
Strange creatures with curved horns adorn her flowered form.
Her hair, still blond after twenty-five hundred years,
Wreathed with branches and wild grasses
Studded with golden birds fixed forever
To worship and carry her into the afterlife.
Was she queen or courtesan?
A virginal sacrifice chosen to appease an angry god?
Who was her husband? Was he the one who sang her to sleep?
"No,” I say, “I’ve never heard of the Scythian Empire, but
I’d sure like to hear that song.”
