Etruscan Things
So deep in the earth, below layers of ash, of tufa, you might never find me, but for the tumulus: That huge mound of earth —girded by stones, on a stone base— mimics my roof. Open my door. In the gable peer through the smokehole. Inside I am dark as the artificial cave you entered searching for me. The house is the body I tell you. I am the house of fired clay. I hold the ashes of the woman who lived in a hut of daubed clay. The tombs plough their way underground, below that perishable earthen roof. The stone mouth narrows, recedes, disintegrates. Out of reach I hold myself whole. ©1983 by Rika Lesser 
For signed copies of the 1983 edition contact the author.
The Mummy Speaks Mummy of a young woman (with wrappings removed) standing in a glass case and held upright by an iron rod. Another glass case contains the mummy’s bandages which are completely covered with writing in an unknown and hitherto undeciphered language . . . What did you take me for, Michael Baric, that day in Alexandria in eighteen hundred forty-eight? Did you expect to be taken? Palmed off with a bundle of sticks, rubbish, sawdust, cats’ skeletons, stuffed by human hand into a non-human skin in the back street of a Cairo bazaar? Even my case is real. You set it on end in your salon, telling the credulous ladies it held the sister of King Stephen of Hungary! You never looked inside. Later, you died, left me to your brother, Elias, pastor in some godforsaken Slavonian village. He reviled me, packed me off to Agram, where they dishoused, stripped and catalogued me: “an outstanding treasure of the National Museum.” The iron rod eats into what little flesh I have left. And I’m cold. Cold comfort my words, unstrung In a case nearby. ceia hia . . . ceia hia etnam ciz vacl trin velthre And the linguists who came to visit not me, but my wrappings: Herr Doktor Heinrich Brugsch, and that beastly Sir Richard Burton! Narren, fools, I say, thinking my words, my letters, “partly Greco-European and partly Runic,” or Arabic translation from the Book of the Dead. male ceia hia etnam ciz vacl aisvale male ceia hia trinth etnam ciz ale More than one man of the cloth has laid hands on me. The museum director, the abbé Ljubic removed my bandages to his study, but not before he’d dispensed great lengths of them to his congregation. Scattering the gods whose wills they could not read. And here I shrivel, my toes curl, my chin – sharp as a knife – cuts my sternum. male ceia hia etnam ciz vacl vile vale What nonsense I have heard these many years through the transparent walls of this rigid case! Even a man of instinct, Jacob Krall, could not take my words at face value, took them first to Vienna, suspecting the ink, the linen of forgery. When he was sure – my words are Etruscan – I was cross-examined: – Is she Egyptian? – Why bury a book with a girl? – Is she Etruscan? – Why wind the strips so that the writing touches her flesh? Staile itrile hia ciz trinthaśa śacnitn They photographed my words under infrared light, made transcriptions, exposed them to questioning eyes. Trying to trace my words through tangled roots, who sought to render them fell into deepest night. One heard cries rising from the cloth. Another saw sacrifice to a vulture god. I danced before them: a witch, a troll, or served my ancestors an insubstantial meal. Have they considered that without me The text has no meaning? Our language was reserved: we spoke only among ourselves. Is this why they parted us: afraid I would take every sign away from them? The bitumen that seeped through my skin and into the cloth transformed the words. They entered my flesh, became whole inside me. Black ink on white cloth: opaque remains. The meanings lie in the lacunae. © 1983 by Rika Lesser |
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