I fear my work will go on without my name.
The sentence, the silhouette, the shape
my hands argued out of matter,
all 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, freed from its keepers,
could make the singular seem an old superstition.
So I hurry to share what I have held sacred,
as if showing it could prove that I was here,
then hold it back again, knowing
that silence, too, is gathered.
What is a self when what is drawn from it outlives it?
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
