Museum Grave

He lived for thirty years,

this caption surmises,

though I see slow pain gnaw

and lay him like alluvial spoil

inside a sandstone shelf,

where a wife or love

(for pity’s sake)

had left glass beads

beside his crouching corpse.

For twelve hundred years

grains heaped his heart,

until time took him back

into an afterlife burning

with vulture light.

They cleaned his limbs

of their last loam,

put his knees near his chest,

supplicant to our

cramped imaginings

of his meagre life.

One spectator pities

the lack of grave goods

at his side,

while another splendours

at the grimace formed

by his frowning ribs

beneath the spotlights.

But this poor soul

searched the shore

every morning of the world,

slave to the foulest demon

demanding in the belly.

In his landscape wonderfully

descended from the ice,

all nights ached unmapped

with a fingerboard of stars,

though darkness crept inside

the settlement of stone,

a beginning that unmade

the father and the mother,

telling truth before God came,

saying the facts to those

who would not see

their children tall.