by Tricia Knoll

I love the book I checked out about digging in the tombs of the dead in Egypt. Loved it like when I was a kid going to the Breasted Museum in Chicago built with Rockefeller money, the first place I saw a dead person, a mummy they called woman. Now I believe the dead should never be gawked at in glass cases. I wouldn’t want my great-great-grandmother treated that way, but as a kid all I wanted to do was go to Egypt with a brush and trowel to explore tombs. College derailed that dream because my family did not want to subsidize a girl going archaeologist. So I studied literature, written decades ago by dead white men in England. But this book, the book I have in my lap this afternoon transports me to Egypt. With hieroglyphics and texts written on the inside of coffins or on scraps of papyrus wound into the yards and yards of mummy wrap. The archaeologists work under the auspices of Yale. This June day with my book is perfect. I’m rocking in a cedar chair. Seventy degrees. No wind. Shade from my hickory tree. The bird feeder invites a parade – Mr. Cardinal, Mrs. Cardinal, two mourning doves, a male and female goldfinch, pushy Blue Jay, nuthatch and chickadees, red-winged blackbird, two different woodpeckers, and the Grackles I am learning to appreciate. Your book entertains me vastly with sifting dirt and the romance of archaeologists. New vocabulary words. Then some bird in the hickory tree craps on me. Rather, craps on the open page of your book. Some good-sized bird. I have done my best to clean it up. I know this sounds like the dog ate my homework. I return the overdue book back to you worse for wear. Like mummies.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet and bird watcher currently besotted with prose poetry. Her work appears widely in journals and nine collections, both full-length and chapbook. Website: triciaknoll.com