They’re the quarks and muons, the gravitons and photons
of an abstracted world;
    and just as the oddly named, nearly weightless
    bits and pieces of quivering next-to-nothingness
    comprise all the matter in the universe…

so too do these seemingly meaningless
oh-so-arbitrary vestiges of a pre-literate epoch  –
    (they look like maps to long-gone mines
    or pictographs of the primordial mind
    or footprints of dreams-come-true)

– become your own atomic building blocks,
the quarks and muons of an invented world,
    though no less real
    than the worlds invented
    from other evanescent arrangements.

Each alphabetic emblem is tattooed and branded
by its secret roots in pre-history,
    and each now limns a song and a sense,
    a weight and heft, a corporeality
    stretched by fusion with elastic partners.

Lovers of language see through words
to the naked hieroglyphs, the mysterious runes
    as life itself sees through its own myriad forms
    to the essential world of almost-not-thereness
    and from flickering  wisps, great galaxies loom so real.

And as potters see grains of clay in finished porcelain,
as Michelangelo sees wise men in slabs of stone;
    so too do lovers of language see cuneiforms and majuscules
    flying in thick flocks,
    and like a firmament of southbound butterflies,

    these ancient emblems flutter from the dawn of time,
    and we’ve only still begun
        to weave their possibilities
           as we follow them
              to the future…