The Midden Heap

Lyrics

The wind off Meilgaard, 1851.
It smells of wet clay, of peat, of opened shells.
A mountain made of dinners.
A library of after, built by instinct.

You are not a grave, not a monument.
You are the knuckle-bone tossed over a shoulder.
The husk, the shard, the residue.
The story told by what was thrown away.
A thousand years of oyster shells, a geology of hunger.
A city's worth of broken pots.
Worsaae's iron trowel sings against your flint,
and I am here, listening for the echo.

This is the midden heap, the unmemory.
Where what was lost is waiting to be found.
And the truth is just un-forgetting.
I will dig until my fingers bleed.
This is the alethanos.
I sing the dust, I sing the ground.

You, with the wild garlic still a trace in your dental calculus,
did you watch the boats come in from the grey water?
You, the bone fragment marked "juvenile" in a cold ledger,
what was your secret game among the shells?
I hold the fishhook carved from a shark's vertebra,
no bigger than a fingernail,
the line still tied is made from human hair.
Whose hair? Was it yours?
A love that small, that sharp, that patient for the sea.

Every forgotten thing arrives here.
The idea that burned in Alexandria's fire.
The cooper's adze, the linotype man's lead.
The god whose name was scraped from the cold stone.
You hold the heat of every fire that went out.
You are the archive of the unnecessary.
The beautiful, wrong theory that felt like breathing.
The love letter nobody bothered to keep.

We are the forgetting ones, the insan.
But here, in the heap, the discarded thing waits.
The song is the shovel.
The name is the light.
Alētheia.
Un-forgetting.
Let the dig begin.