I think of Michael Hannon’s poem, “Ordinary Messengers”: Between heaven and earth I write one line.Sometimes another line follows:ambitious legions singing their way nowhere,or ordinary messengers carried deeper into human lifeby the music and its woman stepping out of her clothes,to the heartbeat of what comes next, what goes on for its own sake.The page after the last page, on which we do not appear. And that is part of the solace of repetitive labor—I …

In the British Museum in the 80’s, the Rosetta Stone was not (at least in my memory) encased in glass but sat open to the air. As I stood beside it and imagined touching its incisions, another tourist, part of a small group identified by matching bags, began filming the stone with a video camera. At this time, before smart phones and digital cameras, I rarely saw anyone using a video camera in public. The stone was …