They have a music:
a violin string
reverberating inside an empty eye socket.
The music of torture
before the idea of torture (an unnamed fear
just outside the light in the caves
where we painted the ibex, the woolly rhino,
the horse’s curious face).
I hear their music enter history: black hands, black feet.
With nothing
to light my way except a string of white lights
draped over the windows facing the street
I pick one off my sock, flick it
into soap-water, turn the page
of a book about American Indian sacred places…
Cars pass.
They are the future: this music of shadows
inside sandstone cupolas
dug out by anonymous fingers on the last day. Dots,
telling the time
This article appears in June 2016.
