the price of peppercorn. In Africa

six rolls could buy a man. The ships would reach

Virginia stocked with slaves or English wives

while every year the farms moved farther west

abandoning their dry, exhausted fields.

Tenacious, fertile, rank as any weed,

Linnaeus counted forty thousand seeds

inside one pod. Miraculus, he wrote,

the cure for toothache, shingles, running sores

or, pushed by bellows through a patient’s lung,

the panacea of the alchemists.

Fragrant, prophylactic, and medicinal,

Pepys chewed it during the Great Plague.

It cost a fortune, but it saved his life.

Later he spent an afternoon to watch

a surgeon fill a cat with just one drop

of the quintessence of Virginia leaf.

… But when a bear was killed, tobacco smoke

was blown into his throat to soothe the spirit.

The elders smoked and chanted in a trance.

The Mayans blew the smoke to the four corners

of the world. It was a gift from God—

profitable, poisonous, and purely American.

GUIDE TO THE OTHER GALLERY

This is the hall of broken limbs

Where splintered marble athletes lie

Beside the arms of cherubim.

Nothing is ever thrown away.

These butterflies are set in rows.

So small and gray inside their case

They look alike now. I suppose

Death makes most creatures commonplace.

These portraits here of the unknown

Are hung three high, frame piled on frame.

Each potent soul who craved renown,

Immortalized without a name.

Here are the shelves of unread books,

Millions of pages turning brown.

Visitors wander through the stacks,

But no one ever takes one down.

I wish I were a better guide.

There’s so much more that you should see—

Rows of bottles with nothing inside,

Displays of locks which have no key.

You’d like to go? I wish you could.

This room has such a peaceful view.

Look at that case of antique wood

Without a label. It’s for you.

MY CONFESSIONAL SESTINA

Let me confess. I’m sick of these sestinas

written by youngsters in poetry workshops

for the delectation of their fellow students,

and then published in little magazines

that no one reads, not even the contributors

who at least in this omission show some taste.

Is this merely a matter of personal taste?

I don’t think so. Most sestinas

are such dull affairs. Just ask the contributors

the last time they finished one outside of a workshop,

even the poignant one on herpes in that new little magazine

edited by their most brilliant fellow student.

Let’s be honest. It has become a form for students,

an exercise to build technique rather than taste

and the official entry blank into the little magazines—

because despite its reputation, a passable sestina

isn’t very hard to write, even for kids in workshops

who care less about being poets than contributors.

Granted nowadays everyone is a contributor.

My barber is currently a student

in a rigorous correspondence school workshop.

At lesson six he can already taste