Mummy Portrait of a Youth, c. 150-200 A.D.
Encaustic on Linden Wood, Egypt
Artwork courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum
it’s basically a Greek island
with freeways around it instead of the sea.
Once you ferry yourself (insert
Charon reference) and the out-of-town
visitor you were hoping to thrill
through it all, you go underground
(insert Hades reference) and park. You shuffle
along a line winding as customs
& immigration. You feel a bit
bedraggled by then, and everyone else
is LA-chic, but you lift your chin
as if you don’t care, you rise on the tram,
and when you emerge up top, it’s okay,
because light is bouncing off of every
gorgeous stone surface, the weather is changing
six times an hour, and you spend too much
on coffee and drink it looking out
at the otherworld of gardens while your guest
takes a phone call or tries to—reception at the Getty
sucks, and it’s fine, no one can bother you here.
You wander off to find the Fayoum portraits
because when the dead look back at you
from their boards, you feel that the end is maybe
not to be feared. They seem to keep you
company. They are as modern as you are,
maybe more so, their curls perfect, and those huge
serious eyes of theirs glistening. You say a silent
prayer of thanks for these ancient people,
and the anonymous painters,
and the dry climate of Egypt that preserved them
for centuries. It’s begun to rain at the Getty
(Zeus, you presume), and you remember
a man you dated for a while, who you felt
kindly towards but did not love, you knew that.
How he took you out on an ochre-sailed boat.
How you worried about him, his smoking
his drinking his wild fragility. How you broke up
a few months later on an international call
and never spoke again, not in anger, but because
it had all been an error in judgement.
You were two people neither of whom
had resources to help the other. It is wrong
that these paintings were taken
from graves. Also wrong that they lay buried
in darkness once, and that this one here—
a child—looks just a moment away
from wriggling and asking, plaintive, bored,
how much longer, and tugging in annoyance
at his bright white tunic and the bit of gold
on a cord at his throat, which the label tells you
probably held a scroll of papyrus. Some amulet,
some prayer of protection curled inside. Wrong
that it did not work. The rain has stopped, insert
sunshine, cheer up, be Demeter when her
daughter comes home each spring. The thing
about the Getty is, it’s an island. Nudge your guest
down the hill, find the car, leave before
the traffic catches you. You can’t stay here.