The Mummy
Silence hung like dust
in the light through high windows.
The still birds caught in flight,
the eagle clamped on heathered rock
rid a rabbit of its plaster bowels,
beak and claw red and bright forever.
The glass-eyed fox, “Vulpes vulpes”,
teeth shone in rictus;
I shaped the strange words with a quiet mouth,
my reflection wraith and vague in glass.
The sunlight, the silence, and the cases.
Morbidity I suppose drew me often
from the swings, the shouts and laughter of a spring day
into the stillness of the municipal museum,
where death glared and swung in mockery of life.
The mound of her nose and pits of eyes
were all that called that yellow mud a face,
the slender slope of shoulders
and the taper to her ragged feet.
About twelve she was, older than I, tiny,
Princess of the Upper Nile,
and those were her toe-bones, the label said;
polished ocherous pebbles.
‘When the four corners of the earth shall meet
you will rise again’: The hieroglyphs translated.
When the birds swoop, the mute swan sings,
the ape gibbers, the pinned spider scuttles,
the fox yips and the eagle soars with dripping beak,
those broken feet may dance again and mud laugh sweet as spring.
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