whose is it
this ancient fabrication
fibers bristled with fiber
dry brush, dabs of ink,
a land that lives in
the distance of all presents?
someone swept a brush,
someone wove a silk,
someone uncurled a worm from its silver
world to make infinity…
each look will take a life,
each eye will open old beginnings,
a landscape embalmed in deaths
of anonymous hands…
what master dripped his questions
in cliffs, what face
bled into their face, erasing
space between the rocks, turning us
with no perspective into place?
whose memories do we
call history? whose myriad vision
re-hangs each moment?
is it only for us to imagine
the brush behind the brush,
bent into each bend
of black ink, ending
where the stillness stills it?
what is this monument at rest
whose waist of mist is made
of paint left out,
a blankness that defies the blank?
how could that master of the Song
paint nothing and still show
that even what he saw
remains unknown
until we fold into the cliffs
and go?