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 labor of a hundred billion lives
across seven hundred and fifty centuries.
I had not imagined that knowledge, freed from its keepers,
could make the singular seem an old superstition.
So I rush to share what I have held sacred,
as if revealing it could prove that I was here,
then draw it back, knowing
that silence, too, is gathered.
What is a self when the derived outlives its origin?
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
