Brother and Sister

Flying back around the world to La,
a smoggy return, he thought about
ceramic jars of corn placed inside
tombs. Osiris made it sprout, food
for the journey, and a promise
of resurrection made by the lord
of the Otherworld, who had known death
himself, had fathered a child with his twin
sister-spouse as she hid in the reeds,
holding his laid-out corpse.

                        They began
the morphine drip at home, hoping to cloud
her consciousness, hoping she would begin
a comfortable sail down this last river,
but she woke up and they invited all
the relatives back for one more visit.
Tired, she couldn't hold her eyes open,
asked them to leave, then said, after
60 years together, she wouldn't leave earth
without embracing her brother.

                            He'd seen
the papyrus showing the dead one led
by jackel-headed Anubis to the judgment hall.
The deceased's heart is weighed against
the feather of truth, and if the scale tips,
he's instantly consumed by the sharp-toothed
Eater of the Dead. If the balance holds,
the man is introduced to Osiris and to Isis,
who had found and assembled all of her husband's
scattered, severed parts.
with his surgeon's eye, the swollen belly,
the bloated lids, the desiccated skin,
fetor, and thought-it will be tonight.
But in the morning she sat up wanting sips
of water, amazing everyone, her body's
tenacity, the skillful cells, at her age,
adapting to work in new surroundings,
in their efforts, cleansing her uremic
blood, keeping her breathing.

                          He'd said
she was a goner 15 years before, when
the newfound cancer was everywhere and
he'd entered the green-tiled room,
had seen her cut open in the OR.,
the metastases studding the omentum,
thousands of tiny seeds, germinating.
Now he thought-she's done it again.
Her miraculous protoplasm, learning new
tricks, and had fooled him.

                        She had said-
you think you doctors are gods, to her
dearest brother. He would laugh, hold her,
and silently judge her chances, wondering
how soon they would close the lid on her
oblong box. He remembered the Egyptian way
of painting faces on coffins, or the eyes
wide, staring from the Djed-pillar,
a promise of eternity, those black-lined eyes
of Osiris that death couldn't close.