Mummy under Glass

Motionless centuries I have listened,
eyes sealed in desiccating glass
to water collecting in blue vapor light,
waiting for it to gravitate,
elongate slowly to a silver tear
and, heavy with my own reflection,
fall on glass that covers my head.

Before it falls, my arid thoughts,
fragile from decades of isolation,
are silent as the sound of reeds in rain
or the tracings in dust of a delicate brush
that unrolls the dry scroll of my mind.

Dry memories rise up from the cranial floor,
kicked up like dust at a drop of rain,
show remembered faces from a timeless world,
all darkened brown that once were white,
are remembered as having eyes,
but contained in glass, dried out, absent
the gift of moisture and life.

Any drops that fell must have shattered myth
and may, indeed, have dropped
innumerable times on top of my glass,
so I cannot tell if the drop that fell
was the very one that I watched forming.

I brood about this, since absent eyes,
the thoughts I have are of summer.
Perhaps this eternal summer will pass
and winter return wet water to ice
to crack my crystal enclosing shell,
let me arise as a dusty cloud
and be atomized to an amber fog.