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TA
HES VISITS HER TOMB
Let
us go to the necropolis
for
a good read. Qaha is
graining
the
last chunk for my mausoleum.
Soon,
children, he will be inserting
the
east slab on which my life will go.
Though
that won’t be till I go. I’ll
not
have
those coarse masons take their rubbings
of
my scratch for the scribes, yet. Varnish
those
eyes with oil, my scrawny liebchen.
That
sand has more disaster in it
than
all the Seth of Lower Egypt.
Leapfrog
down to the last mastaba?
If
you must. But don’t
forget I’m here.
So
this is it. Blank epitaph.
What
relief
carved there would best betray me,
hue
and cry, seeking a vent to life?
Something
curt, witty, uncertain. Here,
perhaps,
my Self’s familiar. With
Bes,
guard
of bed and belly, ugly old
fat
nurse, bringing suet or something.
And
pregnant Taueret, hippo god.
Shall
I again proliferate where
Osiris’s
Field of Rushes grows?
Please
Maat, let me. You say to
us: fire
shrivels.
And day blurs water-blossoms.
Lady
Maat, Truth, let me. I’ll
go mad
if
they won’t allow me to bring forth.
Even
lettuce in a garden, figs.
Or
let me enter the great Nile silt,
though
that is presuming, with Isis
claiming
the best mud for her anxious
fibres.
Besides, isn’t that fancy
they
have down there of weighing the heart
a
bit, well...? With
Dog-chops at the scales
making
sure the heart sinks like a bone
against
the feather, Truth. As if
Truth
were
a thing as fragile, dry as that.
I’ll
have a shabti dummy of me
to
suffer that insult. Sacred
cat!
How
dare they try to measure the heart
that
knows more than these hack fabulists
elaborating
hieratic stills
have
half the brain for! If
it’s reason
they’re
in need of, if they want to tell
how
it is, how it might come to be,
they
don’t need gelded decretal gods
(pardon
Osiris) to explain, like
Anubis
with his butcher’s steelyard.
For
legend, let there... But
that mural
must
tender a style that’s true to me
to
ricochet through the flesh to come.
Depict
me, Qaha, marking the dawn
past
shipwrights and sextons lopping ox,
reapers,
donkeys, serfs hurrying back
with
kohl for madam’s steatite jar,
stroppy
apprentices, fishermen.
Remind
me of Khnumhetep’s party
in
the marshes—Mother of Horus!—
after
the fowl in the marsh dawn! Ra!
he
was so handsome. I saw him
once
knock
down a mallard from twenty yards
with
his bent cudgel. And then
that day
he
had me, with Qar up at Karnak
at
the assizes. Bes, what a
flood
as
he met me like a bearded god
with
lilies round his eyes. A
mantra
that
was. And my Mahu has his
mouth.
My
son. One day you’ll be
chief bowman,
nomarch,
the wardrobe’s overseer.
You
have had your start. From
twenty yards!
The
prodigies that Qar spawned on me
won’t
make the grade. Qar, my
honoured judge,
I
suppose I never expected
much
husband of you. I realise
a
kind of life emerges from you
as
you steer appeals through sanity
to
some correct end. You who
control
the
empire that Tuthmosis dished us,
and
your museum of cronies. They
are
a bright division! Running
mates
of
crooks, gerrymanderers, prelates
born
with dialectic of the bone.
You
shed light, Qar, in your way, I know.
But
night comes. And will they
weigh the heart?
Can
you weigh loneliness, too much joy,
the
bird shrieking on the starry spate,
the
mind’s scorpion that wants to be
a
crocodile, the fertility
of
the mind that wishes to embalm
more
than a pulled corpse parcelled in rags;
mind
that wants the Soul, wing’d Ba, prepared
for
departure down its own dark Nile?
The
heart assists. They would
not weigh the heart.
My
heart of different forms, do not
stand
up against me as a witness,
nor
make opposition against me
among
the assessors. Do not weigh
heavy
against me in the presence
of
the balance-ward. You are
only
the
bludgeon that is in my body,
the
creator that maintains me. I
am
more than you, ever, or your whims.
I
have watched you, I have played along
because
the Ra that channels you must
mean
something. But I have kept
my Self
apart.
Self means more than the great sun
intends.
The sun is always dying.
The
Self grows. Or so Wah
taught me. Tomb,
depict
me as a child, nubile but full
of
push enough to enter into
the
side-stall play as I slink at dawn
where
goldsmiths grill eggs and weavers sweep;
where
seamy peasants hike to work; where
swims
out of the morning’s cool desert
the
long, slow-motion tribute column
from
Nubia; as I walk at dawn
past
limbering prophets, scaffolding,
and
kidneys frying in the sharp air.
Depict
me, tomb, entering the Now
that
makes the Future bigger. Even
dull
Qar knows. You would not
weigh the heart.
Tomb
picture, ritualise for me
a
harvest or a winter banquet
where
these governors, chancellors, priests,
recall
how their thus-and-thus faltered
(to
Seth with Tuthmosis and his hordes!),
learning
to tambourines, harps, sistra,
what
inflexions of the bloody soul
search
from my carelessness and do well.
Qar,
my dear husband, yes, I love you.
Smell
the scent that trickles from my hair,
let
my henna nails gouge your smooth arm,
my
pumiced lip gobble in your ear
like
the night’s flotsam by the hard stairs,
and
let my pleated gown remind you.
Of
course you like them, the topless girls,
serving
the exotica of Punt.
They
are hotter than baboons. Life’s
not
flask
and pomegranate all the time,
but
long enough, Qar. Come,
don’t fool me,
I’d
sooner swallow a gecko whole
than
your late-night pillow lies. I
know
what
happens at the Double Ibis.
We
have different needs. You
act on
active
impulse, while I fold small things
in
a chest as if for a new groom.
We
move from different directions
to
the pane where we’re death’s hesitant
reflections.
You are important now.
You’ll
have your name up in cartouches.
God’s
hallowed wives and their flint dildos!
Do
I care how you exert yourself?
Be
brave as Anhur, thug as a fish,
what
does it matter so long as you
meet
your own image where I’ll meet mine
and
we cross each other? May
Ra’s eye
weep
blessings through his obsidian
contact
lenses. Nothing is surer
than
a phylactery’s frailty
against
this seething sand. Does he
hear?
What
kind of stone? What plea?
Nothing like
Thaa-em-hetep’s,
poor neurotic bitch,
praying
to seven devils at once.
Imagine
them, sneering from their cold:
‘Come
then, make us an offering, Thaa!’
At
least, clapped down full of pious fears,
she
had the salt to warn her brother
what
a freak of demons tamped her tomb.
Children,
that’s a Canopic jar. No!
There’s
someone’s liver there, he’ll wonder
where
his guts have gone, or why it is
his
solar disc is slipping. Still,
it
no
doubt pleasured him to mind his lights.
Perhaps
they led him to his own life
if
he wished to follow them below.
Memorial,
say I was a cow,
like
Hathor, and wished to suckle kings.
Alan
Marshfield
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