Potters Field
Some say the name’s from the Aramaic, “a field of blood,” and others
say potters were wanderers, vagrants, rootless ones, the dispossessed
and friendless.
There are videos of crews in white hazmat suits, digging
furrows for coffins. Three deep, row after row. Bodies in white
boxes that will mix with still-born remains, with bones
of the poor who died from yellow fever and Spanish flu. With
AIDS victims who may have walked past me on New York streets
in bodies flush with possibility. Now they mingle in brown
dirt claimed by tree roots and beetles and mindless foraging ants.
And as for the island that holds this Potters Field? It’s named Hart
Island. Not named “heart,” for the organ beating beneath the ribs
but “hart,” a name for a male deer. A name for an island shaped
like a deer leg. A flattened haunch ending in a solitary spit,
reminiscent of a black cloven hoof that can bear a body
as it walks.