The Dream Tablet

You arrived ready
For language, for us,
For stories, but not
For writing them down.

The writing took us,
Took language, stories,
Even once counting
With calendars, years,

Thousands and thousands
Of generations,
While all of you could
Talk and tell stories

But none of you write,
For us to invent
For ourselves, a way
To escape the caves

Of your living skulls.
The Gilgamesh Dream,
Broken hunk of mud,
Is our dream, not yours,

Invented in air,
Between you but not
In any one you,
A way to pack us

Into more slowly
Corroding formats
Than what you cried out
To the air as lies

About your own lies,
Immortality,
Deities shouting
Mouth to mouth, changing

With every shout.
Cut, copied, copied,
Burned, buried, dug up,
Stolen, sold, stolen,

Passed hand to hand to
Museum vitrine,
Taken back again,
The pattern that codes

Us stayed on that brick,
Dense rows of wedged nicks,
Three-thousand-plus years
More or less the same.