AT THE BIBLE LANDS MUSEUM
for Tony Frazer, maker and keeper of our scrolls
Where will the mind go today?
Archaic languages have been incised in rock,
in grammars older than their writ
build their own causal flares
before the squat idolatries
of empires, gods, the indebted
scribes, their markings—force
shaped into substance, mud
to cuneiform, slate to papyri,
curlicues and swerves, dendrite
equals palimpsest equals layered
grievances agreed to by signatories,
unmarred surfaces that hide a ground
layered in desire and apprehension,
revealed in labor, marking time,
the visible as access to an invisibility,
its power and its uncertainty.
for Tony Frazer, maker and keeper of our scrolls
Where will the mind go today?
Archaic languages have been incised in rock,
in grammars older than their writ
build their own causal flares
before the squat idolatries
of empires, gods, the indebted
scribes, their markings—force
shaped into substance, mud
to cuneiform, slate to papyri,
curlicues and swerves, dendrite
equals palimpsest equals layered
grievances agreed to by signatories,
unmarred surfaces that hide a ground
layered in desire and apprehension,
revealed in labor, marking time,
the visible as access to an invisibility,
its power and its uncertainty.