Katie Hartsock
To the Iceman Ötzi
I cannot know the ibex
and grains of wild wheat,
seeds of flax and poppy,
legumes and hop-hornbeam,
they found inside your gut.
Or the charcoal, arsenic, copper
particles in your hair:
evidence of Chalcolithic
smelting. Or your fashioned axe,
a status symbol, with its handle
of smooth yew. Your quiver
of fourteen arrows, their shafts
viburnum, dogwood: two
were broken and tipped with flint.
Your knife, its blade of chert.
Your tattoo acupuncture,
the inkings – sixty-one –
at meridians that tell us
what you told the one with needles
where you hurt. But yesterday
my sons were walking fallen trunks
and flicking polyphores,
mossy green and white,
stiff stubborn balconies.
Before I made them stop
I pushed one down myself.
So maybe I know how you used
your thumb, pressed close to
the base. Maybe the sound
you heard as they dropped off
five thousand years ago--
I heard that too. They were
buried with you in the ice,
in your fire-making kit:
four chunks of tinder fungus,
with a name – fomes
fomentarius –
slightly repetitive,
but not without its music.
We could translate it several
ways: flammable flame,
fire-starting fire-starter,
the thirst that makes the heat
a heat that wants to burn.
Katie Hartsock is the author of Bed of Impatiens (Able Muse, 2016). Her poems appear in The Threepenny Review, 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ecotone, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. She teaches at Oakland University in Michigan.
Return to November 2021 Edition
I cannot know the ibex
and grains of wild wheat,
seeds of flax and poppy,
legumes and hop-hornbeam,
they found inside your gut.
Or the charcoal, arsenic, copper
particles in your hair:
evidence of Chalcolithic
smelting. Or your fashioned axe,
a status symbol, with its handle
of smooth yew. Your quiver
of fourteen arrows, their shafts
viburnum, dogwood: two
were broken and tipped with flint.
Your knife, its blade of chert.
Your tattoo acupuncture,
the inkings – sixty-one –
at meridians that tell us
what you told the one with needles
where you hurt. But yesterday
my sons were walking fallen trunks
and flicking polyphores,
mossy green and white,
stiff stubborn balconies.
Before I made them stop
I pushed one down myself.
So maybe I know how you used
your thumb, pressed close to
the base. Maybe the sound
you heard as they dropped off
five thousand years ago--
I heard that too. They were
buried with you in the ice,
in your fire-making kit:
four chunks of tinder fungus,
with a name – fomes
fomentarius –
slightly repetitive,
but not without its music.
We could translate it several
ways: flammable flame,
fire-starting fire-starter,
the thirst that makes the heat
a heat that wants to burn.
Katie Hartsock is the author of Bed of Impatiens (Able Muse, 2016). Her poems appear in The Threepenny Review, 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ecotone, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. She teaches at Oakland University in Michigan.
Return to November 2021 Edition