a woman's coffin usurped by a man

In the afternoon she opens her arms as if to embrace him, all right angles and outlines, I cannot feel her. Children often breath against the glass and spell out her cartouche in the fog. It is always dissipating, but fingerprints remain. They tell how to survive in the afterlife; this too a vanishing fog. There are many kinds of fog to remember: from the morning by the river, the walk from the prison, beneath the foundations of the castle, I might have been considering my beheading, almost absently, or else that if I love her I should say so; from the dust of cigarettes and Chinese construction that settles in the countryside after having been carried there on cool winds, her lips are dry, my eyes stinging, the flavor of this fog catching on the sides of the tongue and flaking at the skin; from the eternal childhood of the mummy kept usually in Torino, occasionally loaned out, dark hands, thin, a woman's, weaving the death shroud for the boy's corpse, can we cry for forgotten mothers and small bodies, or must we remain scientific; from the obscurity of alphabets; from train stations; others' memories; buildings that obstruct sunrises; love. Things in which to lose yourself is better than to find it. Or at least more likely. She is painted on the wood. She cannot hold him. Isis is at our feet, rendered upside down so that only we may see her properly as we gaze at our shoes, unwilling to say what we know.