Oh shabti allotted to me, if I be summoned or if I be detailed to
do any work which has to be done in the realm of the dead ... you
shall detail yourself for me on every occasion of making arable
the fields, of flooding the banks or conveying sand from east to
west; 'Here am I,' you shall say.
                                                     —The Book of the Dead

I.

They're looking a little parched
after millennia standing side
by side in the crypt, but the limestone
Egyptian couple, inseparable
on their slab, emerge from it as noble
and grand as you could ask of people
thirteen inches tall.

The pleasant, droopy-breasted wife
smiles hospitably in her gown
(the V-necked sheath "a style popular
for the entire 3,000-year
pharaonic period").
Her skin is painted paler than his:
a lady kept out of the sun.
Bare-chested in his A-line kilt,
her husband puts his spatulate
best foot forward, so as to stride
into a new life.

Not mummies; more like dummies.
Not idols, yet not merely dolls.
Stocky synecdoches
of the ruling class, they survey
an entourage of figurines
at work providing necessaries
for long days under the reigns
of dynasties still unborn.

To serenade them, here's a harpist.
A dwarf even in life—
a mascot to amuse the court
whose music must not be cut short.
A potter modeling vessels that seem,
like him, already fired in a kiln.
Six silos of wheat,
imaginary granaries.
A woman of stone grinding grain,
as she would have, on a quern of stone.
A woman winnowing grain in a pan.
Another on her knees, kneading.
A brewer mashing a vat of beer,
a butcher slitting the throat
of a heifer for the hereafter.

2.

What had it felt like, a credence
in the afterlife of art?
To die, as the departed did,
comforted by the guaranteed
incarnation of a statuette;
to feed then on that slaughtered meat?

To take a leap from the stock-still
tyranny of the literal?
To see the miniature, the fiction
as a grow-in-the-dark depiction
of the soon-to-be actual?

3.

Aboveground, thought was evolving.
So many lords and ladies died;
not everyone could be supplied
with a finely sculpted retinue
of laborers to keep them living.

And how were the high ones to keep
so many minions at their task?
The overseer with his whip
became a smiling, bland convention:
one foreman for every ten or so
farmers with a hoe.

It wasn't only math.
Something unforeseen
transforming transfiguration—
a canny, efficient faith
that less detail might well stand in
for the stand-in;
a simplicity of encryption.

Hundreds and hundreds of years passed.
Alabaster, faience, wood,
the scale of the factotum-totems
dwindled as numbers multiplied;
jostled in the mass graves
of toy-box coffins, they were transported
by a procession of living slaves
a little distance, and slipped
into their niches in the crypt
for the shelf-life of eternity.

Thumb-sized effigies wrapped
in bandages of holy script,
the hieroglyphed Book of the Dead.

Words. The nominal vow to work,
not the enactment of work.
The shabti held one stylized tool,
barely identifiable—
and were serene as Christian saints
with their hatchets and wheels, the instruments
of a recurring martyrdom.
In time they grew more mummiform,
cross-armed at the chest
or armless. Finally, curiously, at rest—

like zeroes who were something
in being nothing,
place-markers of their own
as much as of the master's soul.

4.

And on the wall of a vault,
an artist has drawn himself—
or a cunning substitute—
at work, shaping a life-sized shabti
designed to be his twin:
a goateed dandy that our mute,
vainglorious ventriloquist settles on one knee.

Profile to profile, they stare
into the mannered mirror
of the other.

In whatever kingdom this was
(by now, the blink
of one kohl-lined, almond eye),
what did people think was the lifespan
of the stunt man who betokens man?
The shabti sent to make shabti?

But the question too has shrunken,
eroded to vocabulary—
one fine old potsherd of a word
to be carried from the museum
like any other item
in the museum shop:
a replica necklace, a postcard.

The visitor is illiterate.
What did that stone scroll say,
meant to convert someday
to the thing it represents, papyrus?
Even the scribes couldn't read.
Something about the god Osiris
who came back from the dead.

She must be going.
Feels for the gloves in her pockets,
empty hands for her hands.

Opens a door to Chicago,
where a fine dust is ticking
coldly onto everything;
where she is still alive, and it's snowing.