We are the reliquaries of lost time;
Until our age, the rage to know, collect,
And try at saving everything our eye could touch
Or hand could shape, was raped
By violence of rushing years—
The winds that blew and took our sense,
The rivers on their way to seas
Which swept all fact away
And left us with a coinless bank and empty hands
In storms that blew hot sands abrading wits
So we lost all; not only chaff
But kernels sweet with reckonings of place and hour and myth.
Our tongues were feeble, yet spoke truths
And passed them on as best we could at fires.
Desires and dreams hid in the mouths of few
Who traveled telling tales down history.
The same tale varies
With the telling of these nomad reliquaries…
But they were all we had!
Until a clay cuneiform took catprints from our paws
Which could be read on shores long after tides of men
Died off and left the wreckage of their nightmares
And their architectural graves.
All this we know, have said.
Because of it, most of the past lies dead.
But us? Now, us?
What do we do that’s special fine?
The wines, the vintages of time we store away
As apothecary and thus savior of the nations
And the nations’ blueprintings
Of their elder shadows and their children’s bright noon suns.
We’ve won.
That’s simply put, yes, right? Right. Simply put.
We’ve won.
For look and comprehend:
We are the reliquaries of all time!
Where saints’ sweet bones were once collected
And put up in crystal cannisters with golden lids,
We hide a better stuff. Not bones, not skulls,
Integuments of archangelic flesh, not pontiff mummified—
Old John Paul powdered to a snuff against the ague.
We beg from time and keep it all, yes, all,
And once again, now hear it: All!
Machineries now keep what once
Was gone and lost away forever in a sleep
From which no beckoning could bring
So much as one bright word, one monarch’s myth,
One child’s plaything.
We better that.
We chuck and toss and tape and data-ratify
Our world into electric hats (six? seven and one half?) (large? small?)
Which others wear ten thousand years from now and stand them
Tall.