The Same Symbols

We all start from your basic
Toolkit of instinctive signs,
It seems like—spiral doodles,

Roughly geometric lines,
Clustered lines like puckered stars,
The outlines of your own hands.

These crop up too far apart
For it to be likely you
Carefully remembered them.

There’s some kind of instinctive
Sign-drawing inside your skulls,
A non-cultural substrate

For your visual cultures,
Those curlicues on rock walls
And stipples painted in caves

That complexify under
The right conditions, gather
Themselves into numbers, words,

Iconic symbologies,
And then we’re off, and next thing
You know, we’re myths and edicts,

Accounting, sacred scriptures
On birch-bark scrolls, instructions
For right living on bamboo,

Spells, star charts, divination,
Epic poetry, the whole
Tangled bolus of us now

Come down to these squiggles
Still using variations
Of the signs kids draw in sand.