Vessel with Two Feet, ca. 1000–800 BCE

It’s as though the birds all know each other, and how naively

they seem to believe the world will go on. The swans oh-so-sweetly

in their museum-white, yet all anger and sinew like teen girls,

believing they own all of this, our planet, the greens and blues, until

they gorgeously realize they have been neglected. The crows—

their feathers touched with the most purplish verbena purples

of a sunrise over a smoked sky—know otherwise.

They seem to have known the fate of things before we did.

Have you never heard them awake at the crack of dawn? What

else do you think they have been preparing for, if not the end?

In the Brooklyn Museum, there is a Vessel with Two Feet from

which wine was drunk in Ancient Persia, when my people were

still there, finding a religion. Wine would be poured into the clay

vessel from above and flow out from holes in two actual feet

at the bottom. It appears to be the bottom half of a pregnant woman,

but only to me. Drinking from these little legged vessels

was said to remove the drinker’s grief, and what are artifacts

if not the misunderstandings of a happy life. The plaque helpfully

reminds us that a vessel with holes on the bottom would not be

practical for storage. On the rooftop across from our apartment, where

just last week a twenty-something danced a primeval dance for TikTok,

we watch a pair of crows make a nest in a cracked plant pot.