In the Iliad, there is no natural death– everything comes about by intent as if the pulse and very breath we take were something meant to be shaped. All that violence out of somebody’s error. The same clumsy butting against the sense of things over and over, horrible, then somehow forgettable. And in the middle of the shield, in the middle of the day, in the middle of their never- ending tasks, the women go on yielding to it, scrubbing the corpse cloths whiter than ever, digging with their sticks in the dirt, hauling the water back and forth, over and over, where it runs forever through the dry ditch.