AMEN
AMEN
When they brought the King Tut exhibit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I remembered I was once the boy king. I am a middle-aged man and I take walks through the park that surrounds the museum where the display was to take place. When I was a boy we called the park the La Brea tar pits, and besides a cinder-block structure over one of the smaller pits that contained a tarry glob of bones, the pits and scrub brush was all there was. They landscaped it when they built the museum and the rabbits are gone.
I thought: I am the boy king, but I have no one to tell, and anyway, they would not want to hear my complaints. They wouldn't even want to hear about the rabbits. Who would listen to the resentments of an African child that have lasted three thousand years? I want the honey cakes I used to eat. Give me back the papayas and sugar cane, and the sweet milk. Let me watch the old woman making it again. Warm it in a gold bowl, slowly so that it does not form a skin and add honey and cinnamon and cloves all the way from Zanzibar. And my name even as king was never pronounced Tut, and Ankah Amen are also cruel impositions. We followed the Nile into Elombiloo, we never knew an Egypt, and my name was Walifaloo, which means gosling, until I became king, when it was changed to Sukah, which meant gold or honey comb, the honey of the sun. The archeologists have invented for us a language appropriate to stone. Once again I have been prepared for the tomb.
Our language sounded like the warbles of water, and it led us into Elombiloo, singing to us all the way of paradise, even as it was flowing towards the salt. Once we had walked the other way, south, that was when the Sahara was drying out, and it took us a thousand years to find the Nile again, but when we did, it did not take us long to become fluent again in our natal tongue, and be persuaded to follow the river back to Eden. But, our language held notes from its river source and that is what poisoned me as much as the poison added drop by drop to the honey milk I still drank until the night I died, before I was twenty. Half the vowels in our tongue were given to the moon, and every time we spoke we dedicated half of what we said to its mountains.
Dead before twenty. Today I am three times as old as I was when still thinking of myself as gosling and wishing I could watch dragon flies. Of course, the courtiers had me spoiled to keep me immature so they could wield the power, and I died that way, pouting, mopping, and no amount of years in other lives has consoled me for that first death. I was shielded from the subtleties of human politics. I was king by ten, women were brought to me, and I believe I fell in love with all of them. They were bathed in oils and perfumes and dressed in fine cottons that fell away with a touch, or were made to seem to resist for a little while, but I never knew disappointment and no love ever left me or grew old.
By chance, I was taken to the exhibit; otherwise I would not have gone, especially after I remembered whom I had once been. Enough of the dauphine remains in me to resent all the other visitors, or worse, I might have looked into the eyes of every young girl-several hundred incarnations have not dimmed my expectations to be adored nor my belief in the second sight of lovers-a shriveled old man casting moon eyes while waiting to be recognized. Some friends had an extra ticket and frugality got the better of me.
Hundreds of us waited in line for our opportunity to file past the artifacts. So many of the objects have been imitated in movies or motel lobbies that even without the melodramatic settings and lighting I would have thought I was visiting the museum of first kitsch. Once again, I realized there would be no sympathy. I couldn’t tell anyone that while this wooden torso in front of us was being carved, I would walk to the low wall of the balcony and look out over the river lined with palm trees and I would hear the wet sizzle of fishermen's nets hitting the water and hear peacocks in the garden, and see green squares of papyrus and barley cut sharply against the sandstone desert. Women were washing clothes, their laughter and voices as distant as if already from a past life, and I would remember when I was a baby carried along the banks to be bathed in the river with papyrus stalks around me and I was not yet a king. Voices from happier times in the full sun with the mud banks baking and sweat drying on my skin and a wind touching its cold nose to my cheek came skimming over water to my ears, and I would have to be called back to sit for the craftsmen, and they bribed me with dates and figs, but you can see all that regret for the life from which they have summoned me in my eyes painted on this carving.
This breastplate, this scepter, this amphora that will hold my heart: I hated them all. When I died and for a time floated in the room, and they brought out the sarcophagus with the gold likeness that I had turned away from on the bed when I lay dying from the poison in the honey milk, and turning away felt the cold tears on my cheeks as the servants fanned me, I said to them, “You succeeded”, and then was plunged into darkness where my soul slept undisturbed by the lions and eagles that found it in that night.
No one to tell that I have never had a day without falling in love since I was five, and that at sunset I see a tree in that bronze light exactly as I have seen a tree, a vase, a pot, a bird, a rug, a wall, a post, a face, just before the darkness of death closes my eyes in another life-in the same beauty and filled with the same sadness as it is being torn away. Things of bittersweet passage are all the memory retains. At the time when we are returning them, we remember these things were given to us as premonitions.
Starlings buzz and trill in three pine trees growing near the Japanese Pavilion. Bamboo is planted along the path. In the early mornings the crows make the strangest clatter; I cannot interpret their language. Frequently, I search a tree in the hope of finding a bird consoled for its ugly voice by golden plumage, but instead spot a crow, its black feathers ruffled, daring death to kill it for insubordination, maybe because it eats carrion and has no reverence. I keep an eye peeled for the return of a copper and white pigeon with feather spurs on his legs. He is the size of a falcon, and I'm afraid this park was only a way station for him and he will not be back.
When I was a boy the city had not yet reached this park; it remained largely as it had been when it was an asphalt quarry. At dusk, cottontails bounded away into the tall weeds and chaparral bushes that grew untended near the tar pits. We kids ran through the shadows between houses where the ground stayed damp, climbed fences between backyards, some of them risky barriers and a rite of passage, a measurement of your height. We knew the dogs who were left outside, the ones grown mean with loneliness and the others so glad to see someone they pissed, and our chases led us over lawns and driveways and through breaches in fences and tunnels beneath hedges and onto spindly trails through clusters of banana trees, and in summer we were still out after dark and saw flowers light their candles in the hour of dusk, saw the yellow lights emerge through windows and everything inside become longing and gratefully rejected, and if you heard our voices from inside a house they sounded a world away already and leaving.
Indians saw a rabbit on the moon. I find it now more readily than the man I used to spot as a kid. I don't think it got there by jumping. I think finding that waif's small print in the snow he was wished a resting spot in eternity.
