Same Stone

It lay a century under a name it never had, a skull from the hill east of Cairo, filed with the false gharials because the snout ran long and no one then could prove it otherwise.

The front of that snout is gone. So is the nose of the Sphinx, cut from the same limestone, the floor of a warm, shallow sea that took the crocodile in and later gave the god his face.

Now it is named for Horus, half kindness and half joke: the face without a nose, the jaw without its end, one stone for both of them.

What I keep is smaller. The drawer. All those years of being right and unread, the bone already different before anyone looked again.