Still, after his death, many fakes were discovered.
The ruin manifest as dream. He deployed figurines

of ancient deities at which he gazed. Those with
half-turned heads he positioned over journals.

*

His antiquities: the buddhas, the protectors,
the instructive voids he saw in Roman jars

half-filled with a crematorium's ash and bone.
Those heaps! Their inimitable deserted air—

out of that clay and back to clay, adamah!
What to will from these shapeless mentors of speech?

What utterance lifting powdery blackened grains
to something human? What voice to throw out

against those other gods always in miniature in their cruel presiding,
in their fixed vesseling in bronze and stone?

Time-maimed fickle Isis-Osiris, noble Avalokitesvara
whose raised hand is a gesture to the named and unnamed

who stand guard over the scriptor. And there too,
are the onyx-faced ones, scowling at heresy and betrayal.

Do not look askance; do not miswrite! Thus, to hear
each persona in the room utter form, in babbled hope

of words poured back over the eons, in hope of words
given to gods as sacrifice, as exigent futures

of sound, divinities claimed in flawed obeisances.

*

The collection was a dream unmarred by forgeries
he ruthlessly eliminated. Manifestations of half-turned heads

he thought of as ancient deployments, listening to patients
as though gazing on collections of ruined forgeries.

He deemed these manifestations as collections he deployed.
Half-turned dreams of patients gazing toward ruins,

of ancient figurines he looked at ruthlessly while journals
under deities lay open manifesting as his collections.








The Language Exchange
The Campbell Corner Home Page