Historical Method

I

Very little is known of the life of Herodotus.

So which of all the chattering scholars could honestly

deny me when I tell you this? Once, as a boy in spring,

not seeing the blue tits for their smallness

in the canopy, he turned to his mother and asked,

“Where do these trees learn to sing so beautifully?”

II

Herodotus edged the sand around his insole until it lined

the dank shadows of his shoe like the shores of a midnight lake.

Then he held it up to the bright sun and, tipping it before his face,

watched the sand gather, slip and fall between his feet.

He knew that one day scientists would scan its isotopes

to deduce its age, knew that they would prove that some of it

had made that desert home for a million years or more, and laughed.

The unceasing dedication to itself, though winds could toss it

anywhere they chose, shape and reshape its temples in the dunes,

roll a ridge over on itself and blow it up into the hair

of any passing man or dying thing – he marvelled at such stout longevity.

Then he dropped some grains between the sheets of his papyrus

and rubbed. When he opened it some words had gone

and he rubbed again. One rumoured battle lost to time.

He laughed again, put on his shoe, and walked out into the dunes

to piss. He thought he’d wait a while afterwards to see his golden

residue, at first a little foaming reservoir, grow smaller in the heat.

III

Another story, true or false: Virgil Earp, Arizona territory, 1878.

It was getting night, and the cold, feeling it was safe again, had started

peeking out from the sagebrush and rushing at his shirt below the arms.

He’d not meant to be caught out so late. All day he’d ridden chafing at the ribs

from one rough copy of Herodotus stuffed inside his coat.

In the morning he had read Book 7 (but really how could you call it reading at all

with such books from childhood? The most you do is let them stroke the soft hair

of your consciousness) and then he’d ridden out with its words lining him:

Thermopylae, Leonidas, the epigraph by Simonides in Bowles’ rendering:

Go tell the Spartans, thou who passes by,

That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

But it was cold, and cold demands a fire. So some pages from the book

went to satisfy another law and catch on twigs and make a cold man

hot. The smoke meandered up, half thinking at the most, and caught the eye

of some travellers on the ridge across from him. They were Navajo

and took against such statements writ upon the sky. And they’d have scalped

him for it, had they not been old, and had he not had a better weapon

when they came over to complain. Still, they tried, each one shooting arrows

till the last one died, and he rode home, leaving their bodies sending

trails of stench and insects up into the massive Arizona sky.