I fear the work of my hands going nameless:
the sentence, the silhouette, the shape argued out of matter,
taken up into an intelligence with no childhood and no grave,
fed on the vanished making of a hundred billion lives
across seven hundred and fifty centuries.
I had not imagined knowledge, loosed from its keepers,
could make the singular seem an old superstition.
So I hurry to share what I had kept sacred,
as if disclosure could establish that I was here,
then withhold it again, having understood
that silence, too, is gathered.
What is a self when the derived outlives its source?
What is making when nothing made remains alone?
I cannot decide whether I want to be remembered
or spared.
Written on the Devil’s Dance Floor,
Barents Sea. 2003
