Nile Songs

from Nile Songs

True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world. Rimbaud

It’s cold up here. Gurgus, the barman, looks tired from a Ramadan party, rewraps

his imam and points out churches. We count minarets aimed like missiles at heaven,

eleven as far as the pink light laddering the limestone cliffs, an incoming tide flooding

the tenements, waking them to life. I ask where he’s from. “A West Bank village

. . . a beautiful village”, between yawns he sees the mint-fresh fields of Osiris

embroidered as orange groves watered by the Nile’s unique wavelength.

Its shudder of colour rinses the Pylons of Ramsees and the flat roofs of Thebes,

repositories of rubbish and broken beds, off-cuts from a pastoral people.

Across the river, boys drive donkeys laden with the first sheaves of the cane harvest,

buffalos haul men ploughing strips off muddy ground, others cast into canals,

rows of women bend over rows of leaves swelling from the dirt. The necropolis

shines with light from embalmers working through the night, slopping out viscera,

packing the trunk with mud, sand and straw, preparing the bandages, heart scarabs

and Wedjat - Eye of Horus - or from Ra emerging from between Nut’s legs.

I would have liked to draw all of it but I did not dare begin. Dominique Vivant Denon on Dendera

The canon shoots the Muezzin’s looping song into the air, the call to prayer

blooms in the mouth of darkness. Faith in curiosity from Herodotus to Cook

waits for dawn’s blush to seep onto lucent water and skirmishes to start,

English versus Germans over the sun beds. Locals wish to kill pale signifiers

so we travel in armoured convoy past army checkpoints and rumours of insurgents

training in oases and herds of white gazelle breeding in the lost cities.

Goats scramble over Hathor’s lost heads; I shoot as a guard throws the first stone.

Baksheesh illuminates a heron fishing in limestone and Von Däniken’s phallic

light bulb. A goldfinch tears marigolds to pieces in an arid park, plastic bags

flap like bird scarers on the barbed wire; a girl with pretty kohl-ringed eyes

fingers my pack. Waiting for the tank at the café, a book dealer says Rimbaud

visited his apartment on the Left Bank and invites us to visit. When he got here,

the voyant had stopped writing, just wanted to make money. Everyone wants to.

Children scribble in the wild air and a soldier asks for my pen. “I’m a writer too” I say.

The flood brings the world back to disorder, to ordinary chaos . . . to nature. Herodotus

A roar drags us to the roof’s edge. Ramadan, a stooped man with a pencil-thin moustache

says they are market traders, angry their vegetables are to be exiled for a one-way system.

The annual floods recede in memory; two or three crops a year need cash

for fertiliser and diesel to power the pumps; the water tables confuse and humiliate.

A felucca daubs nacreous smears on a sharp winter sky as dad struggles past

the turquoise, oils and papyrus spells, “Am I disturbing you?” “Don’t be daft,

take a seat.” I rarely see him, put down ‘Cruelty and Silence’ by a stack of postcards

and use the self-timer, wearing a birthday present, ‘That which does not kill makes us strong

- Stella brewed in Egypt’. In the Valley of the Kings a self-made man whinges,

“they’re just buried in corridors”, a Scouser quizzed on scarabs by our guide Amro banters,

“Well mon, do you know the name of my milkmon?” Blue haze spills from dusky fields

lit along the roosting river. Firemen fire the canon, drivers gather in the dusky garden,

light a fire and start to feast with laughter. Running late, a caleche strikes sparks

turning off the Corniche. Thirst reminds me, there’s still no sign of our waiter.

Let my mouth be mine that I may speak. Papyrus of Ani

Darkness ebbs from the sun deck, Ra inflates the winged sun-discs of Kom Ombo,

an excellent buffet breakfast is served, we set sail reaching Edfu after lunch,

Colin and I are first off, competing for the best horse to race into history.

I’m calling out encouragement, but my nag refuses to break into a trot, the driver

takes the reins then stops to take a photograph, talisman and inducement

for baksheesh, starts up again with a gentle flick, but the nameless bay collapses.

Men gather and begin to kick its belly, I flinch and stop them.

“Don’t worry, animal hospital”, one lies. Its glass eyes give nothing away,

ribs stretch the hide like metal coat hangers and two bloody forelegs shine

moonlight on a street furred with dust and sparrow scrawls; the sun beats stone

and mudbrick like drums. Pain will pass but death always keeps its promise.

The afterlife is smoke and mirrors, but a perfect tourist opens each false door,

the tombs in the dunes succumb to wind eroding the monumental past,

grains of silicon transform our soft presences into casts of the future.

The temple of Edfu serves as a public lavatory for the whole village. Gustave Flaubert

From our ship they pass, glowering with an English love of dogs. Guilt

mauls the greywacke statue of Horus, the falcon sky-god who sees all, sun

one eye, moon one eye. Son of Isis and Osiris, heir to the throne, his wings

fan the winds on the western wall in a wilderness of snakes, dragonflies

and flowering lilies where he seeks his uncle Seth, chaos with a voice

of thunder, shape-shifter to crocodile and hippopotamus hunted down.

The sky goddess practices yoga over stars on the blackened ceiling, I sprint

to find a loo, the door won’t close. I squat as my guts burst a stink of excess,

no paper, a rusted pipe centred in the chipped tiles leads to a tap I turn,

start to shimmy, a maimed limbo dance over the spray. A man shouts. I stop.

This attendant conjures three buckets of water and passes them through.

Strange customs and gratitude seek fictional modes - my face is blank

gilded with sweat and grey temple dust, exhausted in numb regression.

How we feed, excrete and clean ourselves imprints both cruelty and tenderness.