When I’m feeling down about the human condition, that is, my
                                    human condition, I consider all the crappy jobs I could have had
                                    in another life. An executioner, say, or worse, the one to cart the
                                    bodies away—there are more difficult things than poetry, aren’t
                                    there, I remind myself, what if I’d been a mummy maker, with
                                    a desiccation degree, that would be no cakewalk, mummifica-
                                    tion was an industry, thousands of ibises and sacred cats, bulls
                                    even—those whoppers took 40 days in the sun to dry and speak-
                                    ing of meat, sacred or no, the smell was awful (those long days
                                    under the blood-orange Egyptian sun, you never got used to it,
                                    when you went home your wife refused to make love with you),
                                    but it was an important job, this populating the afterlives of oth-
                                    ers, providing guard animals, and pets, not to mention massive
                                    quantities of foodstuffs, none of which could you sneak home,
                                    the guards always patting you down, Ra forbid your old lady
                                    should be grateful enough to give an inch or you should live even
                                    a little of the afterlife you made for others. No, it is your lot to
                                    cater that picnic in paradise, never to partake of it, you have to
                                    be committed, as I tell my students, it is a way of life. The priests,
                                    they did the people, they didn’t really get it, what it entails to
                                    mummify a goddamn bull or 15-foot crocodile—they were fuck-
                                    ing huge—and the baboons, you had to yank their canines, house-
                                    break them dentally, before putting them down. No, it is no small
                                    job to populate the afterlife, it takes a brutal tenderness, atten-
                                    tion to life’s cruel details, all that moisture in which we live, the
                                    very lubricant of our mobility, drawn out molecule by molecule,
                                    though we didn’t think so micro then, and there you were lacing
                                    up your sandals, grabbing some rice cakes and dates for lunch,
                                    leaving for work, which, though worse than poetry, as fates go,
                                    could have been truly horrific—you could be quarrying stone for
                                    temples (long hours on barges, mosquitoes big as dung beetles, no
                                    hazard pay)—No, you had your own role to slave over, supply-
                                    ing pharaohs and courtesans a kind of Noah’s ark of totems and
                                    sacrifices, right down to the royal cock fights, so who could blame
                                    you for amusing yourself with the occasional mummy joke—the
                                    kitten placed in the sarcophagus of a lion, an ibis in a crocodile,
                                    a fish inside the ibis, a scarab inside the fish. It got you through
                                    those long-ass days while the sweat was drawn out of you gram
                                    by gram or iota by iota or however by whatever they measured it,
                                    and for what? What was waiting at home? A woman who couldn’t
                                    bear the stink of death on you, who probably spent most of her
                                    day rubbing olive oil into some noble’s feet, and so you get home
                                    and heave yourself down on a grass mat and say there just has to
                                    be a better way than this, than this life I am living and your wife
                                    says quit your bitching, this once, I’ll get the oil, and here you are,
                                    back in your hut of baked mud and palm thatching, your staff
                                    and sandals propped by the front door and it is cooler here out
                                    of the sun, out of the way, a moment’s pause, an eddy in the Nile,
                                    and it doesn’t matter if your sweetheart has been anointing other
                                    men’s feet or polishing their silver till her hands blackened, or
                                    the Papyrus Monthly won’t publish your work—you are together
                                    now, in this life, in this moment and the sleeping baby has your
                                    nose and the over-pounded, unleavened, tooth-shattering bread
                                    is warm, so quit your whining, you could be humping pyramid
                                    blocks through sandstorms, you’ve got it good, you can’t even
                                    smell yourself anymore, you are golden, here, have a fig.