Lynne Wycherley
A Pazyryk Burial
She made her bed on the high steppes
green pastures scoured of snow
where the Altai speak in ethers,
blue sublimations, glazing
the Gobi desert with their breath.
Her horses kneel in harness,
felled by an axe. A cup of dry koumiss
waits for her lips. I see her tribe
stoop round her, hands red as midwives',
stitching her skin.They balm her
in herbs and fine wool, they dress
her ribs in yellow silk, they set
her head-dress on a raft of swans.
When the ice broke, they bled
to summer pastures, skeletons of yurts
swaying on their backs, driving their herds
through the rush of the thaw.
Snowmelt juiced round her body
waiting to flex its steel arms.
Mountains hunkered in the loneliness.
Millennia hovered in her ice-bound bones.
I see her log coffin, the swell
of an ulna through parchment skin,
a storm-stag tattooed on
her shoulder, tossing its tines
while wolves and steppe-cats
flex claws on red leather.
She lies with them on the mineral heights,
a death cradled to the cheek
of death, where asters flash stars
through flick-knives of the wind
and the thin land strains to vanish,
snatch like the see-through
skull of a kite into the ultimate blue.
Page(s) 66-67
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