The Crowds at the Metropolitan Museum’s 1978 Tutankhamun Exhibition 6

The whole five boroughs turning up on Fifth

Avenue, everyone who would never go

to an art gallery: one can – the years

not quite right, Taxi Driver coming out in

1976, but the context here millennia – think

of Travis Bickle making a happier

choice and asking the Cybill Shepherd

character to the Met rather than to

an adult cinema; and that indeed

he might have found his vexations addressed

by the pharaoh’s ‘You talkin’to me’ 3,000-

year stare: as, equally, one can imagine

Tutankhamun alone in a gold cab,

driving about the streets for ever.       

David Beach

David Beach lives in Wellington. He has written four books of sonnets.