M11

They opened the shriveled cowhides, bracing
for what? All skeletal perhaps. Instead saw
your unembalmed face.

How the skin still fitted your cheekbones,
how the lashes, intact, fluttered once again
to wafts of air four millennia new, how

almost audible what you tried to whisper
just yesterwhile, a half breath away from relief
into the salted wind. Off your breasts they took

the cheese that you never ate, even though
at the time they did not know
what they were taking. These unshapely

lumps. Determined they were
the world’s oldest preserved cheese
(beat the Egyptians’). Called you M11.

*

A century before the Chinese found you,
a Uyghur hunter stumbled on your burial
ground. The version of the story I like most,

but believe to be false, goes that the hunter
hurried away at the sight, and when
asked by a Swedish archaeologist to be his guide,

the hunter refused. He did find the site
on his own, the Swede, and named it
after the hunter. Ördek, birth and death

unknown; but Ördek, big O
with two eyes over it, keeps seeing itself
in books, journals, catalogues, next to necropolis.

*

The Egyptians mummified their dead.
But you were not meant
to be here with us. A miracle, they said,

ascribable to the arid, saline climate and
the leather corset wound around
the boat that held you. A miracle

that exists to end in a vitrine.
Remaining umbra of decomposition
chased away by good display lighting.

Even the Egyptians, who did intend mastery
over putrefaction, could not have foreseen this
outcome, those bodies being vessels to some place

else. I have to imagine that you too
were on your distant way, cheese onboard
and all. Had you arrived

already — before all this looking, this
museumification, before our interception
by excavation and may I apologize for the piracy.

We who have lost all notion of destination,
after only the visible, having been out for too long
…………………………………………….on this sea of sand.