in a year of disease, the museum temple on a toronto street mimics a mausoleum. waves its emptiness like a battle standard repurposed for a shroud. no schoolchildren, boredom and bustle, mill around hermetically sealed portals. i bow my head. sink into white-lit memory of high, echoing halls. for the first time, i saw the wrapped dead, the mummies in the coffins. ten years old, on the knife’s edge of something more perilous than girlhood, i thought i was ready for a global change — a blood shift, a kind of end. the pharaohs, too, thought they were ready. i do not know if all their preparations yielded a full crop in sakhet-iaru¹, the fields of reeds. but their crossed arms and luxurious sarcophagi lured me like a pop star’s melismatic soprano: celine dion singing how glorious, how unimpeachable, the skull emptied behind the kohl eyes of a funeral mask. brains caught by a hook and drained into a bowl; body-horror made glamorous by an amber thread of amulets. scarab beetles tucked up neat in thin folds of desiccated flesh. theirs was a hopeful sorcery to deceive death, even as mine: that child who stacked words like sandstone in her bedroom tomb. her jealous claws catch a worn book cover. open the spine to white bone and raw word-matter. secrets still unexhumed. she inclines narrowed eyes, the teeth of her hunger — a vulture’s hunger for rotted things — on malodorous paper. laps up faded greyscale pictures. photographs gravid with thick plaster. paints slathered on tomb walls. rust, emerald, ochre. colors of the earth, buried in the earth with ghost eyes to read them, and all of us — pharoah, paints, girl — alone together in the panting dark. woe, woe! that child is gone. now after thirty winters (not many, i know, for the egyptians), is it confined by the walls of this plague: a scythe named for a ring of light. this quarantine solitude is the priest’s. is the scholar's. is a fearful hand bending the reed pen to papyrus. wound up in the long, ribbon bandages of distance, i test my teeth on another text. seek the bronze-age tool to carve wounds on a microscopic death. Teach yourself Hieroglyphs, a new Book of the Dead for this seeker anointed in cedar oil, even as a pharaonic corpse. here i am now, body perched in a white-sailed boat and my heart in the river: the ancients called it itrw². i bow my head. consume —phoneme, vowel, consonant — the meat and marrow of the sacred carvings. first say R and draw the mouth, then the word, ren, a name³ to write myself a life (longer than the Nile).

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