I
The turquoise glaze
worn to earthenware
between the eyes-
the scrawled lotus
break up
the broadness of back,
flare the brow,
decorate a massive
rump: Duchamp's
mustachioed Mona Lisa
glossed this image
four thousand years
later. "Egyptian,
Middle Kingdom, 12th
Dynasty, Circe 1940
B.C." reads the
authentication;
"accoutrement of tombs,"
premium paid
gods of the hunt, sent
into unknown lands
with habitat tattoo,
surrogate blossoms
should there be none.
II
Fecund Thoueris,
upright walking
pregnant hippo
leaning on a magic
knot, you are not;
nor Seth, the evil
one, enemy of Re.
Despite the lotus,
you're clearly
what you are,
piglike, grown to
majesty of size, but
piglike,
wallower, muncher
of riverslop,
boundless shitter,
unchallenged,
mountainously meek,
as Roethke wrote,
a yawner.
III
Popular, a faience
reproduced
in pourable stone,
improvement on
the original
because
we take it home.
Artifact of
an artifact,
it is that
and nothing.
A gift I bought
and didn't give, dear
at fifty-two fifty;
a paperweight or
mantelpiece
piece, borrowed
for this writing,
breakable as bone.
It is that
and nothing,
neither hollow nor
flesh and blood, not
quite up to Eliot.
IV
What is not a form
of exhaustion in
our minds, dreaming
in its own multi-
plicity of meaning?
Rivers of hippos
map each thought.
The brutes swim past
eroded shorelines,
submerged except
for snout and peepers,
winking doe-eyed or
staring like horses,
picking up snatches
of song to croon in
cavernous throats.