GRAFFITI

for my grandsons

Taking in some Napoleonic soldier's scrawl, some

Unlucky Pierre, who left his "I was here 1798"

on the central chamber ceiling, in big red letters,

The sarcophagus lid, the gold, the jewels,

Burgled maybe five thousand years before,

Only the bathtub coffin, the outer shell,

So huge no tomb-robber could budge it,

In place —one of a tour group touring

Remains of the Old Kingdom at Giza last August,

Having seen too much graffiti on the inside

Of Cheop's pyramid, the largest near Cairo,

I began to ascend the steep escape-shaft

Aligned with a star in Orion's (Osiris') belt,

Stooped over, laboring up the wooden slats,

My strength surging in spurts at first,

Then less and less, toward that constellation

Which the old slave-driving pharaoh travelled to,

His soul, they say, shot in postmortem spasms

To a mystery, I say, at and before his conception.

Almost sixty with a bad heart (we did

Not know that then), my two hundred twenty

Pound body stopped, short of the exit.

From behind two nice San Francisco queens

Pushed me, heaving for breath, into the sunlight,

Near cardiac arrest, near no-life-after-death,

Victor, our tour guide, calm as a seen-everything-

Twice mortician, wondering if he was about to have

(all our looking at mummies in museums wrapped up)

A granddaddy corpse on his hands, to fly back

To the States in a plain Trans World Airline

Crate adorned with blue glued-on shipping labels

And, in stenciled block letters, the mighty

Pen name I go by, when I imagine the great

I-stop-at-nothing Kings, quick or dead or deified.