Corpus

I fear the work of my hands going nameless:
the sentence, the figure, 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 did not expect knowledge, once loosed from its keepers,
to make the singular feel like an old superstition.

So I hurry to share what I guarded as sacred,
as though disclosure could establish that I was here,
then withhold it again, having understood
that silence is also gathered.

What is a self when the copy outlives its source?
What is making, when nothing made stays alone?

I cannot decide whether I want to be remembered
or spared.