Unknown and Gone

No one’s stories or poems resist
The liquefaction of their bones.

Even Shakespeare, Sappho, Li Bai,
Pick one, are long unknown and gone,

The bodies unknown to the names
That remain while other bodies

Pretend those names had flesh like them.
Names have never had flesh, except

In the sense that names may direct
Some of the functions of the flesh,

Including those actions that wrote
Long lines of names flesh had in mind

And sometimes spoke, and sometimes signed,
But sometimes only had assigned.

There’s a chance Han Shan and Homer,
For instance, never dressed their bones.

Djed Shepsh, there’s a name kept its flesh
Snug under a five-ton stone lid

Forty-three hundred years or more,
Unknown and gone until last week.

It’s a danse macabre, isn’t it,
The waltzing of names with corpses?

Sometimes, you know the name and hope
To find such-name’s mortal remains,

Sometimes you only have a corpse
You can’t resist giving a name,

But do the names care? No we don’t.
Gather rosebuds or gather dust,

No bones can belong to the poems,
Although a few skulls may hide some.