While hunting mummies at the British Museum

my daughter asks When someone dies will you

help me make an altar? and I wonder

if she’s made some kind of peace

with the vast incomprehensible

that laps our lives. Between her question

and my Sure there is a long shush-sigh.

Some call this the word, others the lie.

I call it the reason love is laced always

with a stunning sadness. When I was her

age, I buried my pets beneath our side-yard

cypress, sometimes with a favorite toy

or brush, but let’s not dig those bones up,

not here. This mummy, so unlike the cartoon

version she expected, no bandages trailing,

only flesh so long dead it’s shrink-wrapped

unrecognizable, to pelvis, to skull.

When she is older I will make her promise

to bury me naked, unbound. I want to vanish

quick. But right now, she wants to understand

a thing by repetition, even of the dead.

She demands another and another

until there are no bodies left

in this museum. I imagine dirt

dissolving this body that birthed

her. Her hand, still so small

in mine as we try not to lose

each other in the crowd

gathered around the child-

sized mummy. And because I might

be vague about the Tooth Fairy

and Santa, but swore I’d never lie

about the big stuff, I have to say Yes

when she wonders, inevitably,

if she too will die. The next

sarcophagus is empty,

so I myth it with a mummy,

bandaged-wrapped and risen,

then make the promise, that is,

at best, only half mine to keep:

But baby, not for a long, long time.