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The facts: someone made a drill of flint
And bore into her cranium for hours,
a procedure
She survived, living on some twenty years.
Someone fashioned a device with which she might detect
The wave-crash of a sea three hundred miles away,
Worked shell to a phosphorescent simulacrum
Of auricle and cartilage, a lobe she’d worry
Until her fingers rubbed it smooth as skin.
Of untold mysteries we are composed. Gray matter,
Soul, ether. The light staggered out from the depths,
From synapse, memory, REM state.
& was affliction cured?
& did she prophesize—oracle, priestess, sphinx?
Wounded goddess, did she unclasp her shell-ear as she lay down to dream?
The words are rebus.
All we can hear is the guttural sea.
Introduction
Something of Us to Prove Our Afterlife: Notes on “Ochre”
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements