The Persian Wars

Into the palace in the pool I tossed my wishful coin. That day, our last together, my eyes were little scavengers, looming over your body in the pool as though it were already dead, your face afloat above the minted faces, the sour taste of metal in my mouth. . . . After each conquest, Alexander the Great ordered the enemy’s coinage


melted and recast in his own image. That’s how I put it now in my new language, where history is written in the simple past and laid to rest inside a book, like the soul inside the body, waiting for a stranger’s hand to pull the silver from its throat.