What we glimpse of her now is less
than the frozen trickle of light from a star
extinct since the Pharaohs’ age
yet flickering. Every hour the familiar eyes
get fainter, the form less clear; the living
come to revise her words, like cousins
contesting a will, and claiming
who she loved most, most favoured — who she
failed to praise — who she failed. The dead
are a newfound planet, drifting,
distant as Neptune’s moons, but colonized
quickly, gridded with myth, their bones
embellished like the relics of saints —
each breath they’re less themselves and more
like satellites in a galaxy, born
of need and speculation. Because we must
we rewrite the dead — bind them in silence and dust-
jackets of soil, of pine. Soon enough their souls
become too frail to slip
the gravity of defining words, and fail
to check our sloppy captions. So they don’t point out
how we absolve them of their being
and replace them, soon, the way a stellar
hologram might be flashed on the sky
the moment the Pharaohs’ star blinks out.