After Observing the Mummy with My Students at the Museum

One says that his skin glows,
another that he looks peaceful.
Amber-hued yet desiccated, he seems to me
indifferent, the world now the least
of his miseries, his narrative resolved.
He lies surrounded by scarabs, their brilliance
auspicious, more to my liking,
the way their jeweled green and lapis backs
hint at reed and river, the earth that tethered
him, the sky that his gods occupied.
It is no phenomenon, to ritualize death,
the wake for my own father just weeks ago
a somber sort of party, adorned
with photographs and flowers until grief
stomped in like a wayward moose,
terrifying in its stature, but wielding
great tenderness in its enormous eyes.
We move on to the dinosaur remains,
the reconstructed bones majestic, scaffolded
with bolt and steel. We learn to tell carnivore
from herbivore by the teeth,
which bones lingered in pits of tar, how
the creatures thrived, connected to their ecosystems,
could not abide change. One student asks

the docent about the size of their hearts,
and I don’t hear the answer as my own
beats loud and primordial, despite being
petrified lately, my body performing
in hypothalamic motion, first to care for then to bury
both parents within five months, their lives
too entwined to survive one without
the other. There was a holiness to their faces
in their last days, gaunt and drawn yet knowing,
much like the mummy. I wander back to study his face.
Peaceful is right, I decide—the deliberate fold
of his hands across his chest, the scarabs
shimmering, singing remembered, remembered.

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Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), both from Sundress Publications. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Rhino, Tinderbox Poetry, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, Waxwing, and many other journals. Her third full-length collection is forthcoming in 2020 from Sundress.