I Forgive All Untruths

I forgive all untruths that brought me here
to uncut world outside redoubts of prayer.
Perfection is itself a man-made sphere.

I once thought the path constructed, clear:
an Architect fit life to Truth with care.
I forgive all untruths that brought me here

where words frame no enclosure, only, freer,
new stories open into untold air
(perfection is itself a man-made sphere),

and wanderers gather at a vast frontier.
Knowledge howls its feral nature there.
I forgive all untruths that brought me here.

The creature hand wants walls and fires that cheer;
the mind, its castle keep and stately chair.
Perfection is itself a man-made sphere,

and moil as we must great wholes to engineer
quick words work through each weather-tight repair.
I forgive all untruths that brought me here.
Perfection is itself a man-made sphere.

©Patricia Karamesines

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Excerpt from Showdown at Crossfire Canyon: Getting Digs In, Part 3

Vandalism at a petroglyph site.

Yes. Yes! In San Juan County, during my field school years in the mid-80s, I saw shocking pot hunting damage firsthand, sites hit very badly. I’m haunted by memories of human skulls and other remains churned up and tossed aside—men, women, children, including a child’s mummified foot—remains meaningful to diggers only as signs that grave good such as pots, jewelry, or other marketable artifacts might lie nearby. The exposed human remains don’t trouble me so much for their grim “to this we must all come” reminders, though there’s always something show-stopping about coming upon human bones. Nor do they impress me for the disturbing evidence they offer of the pot hunters’ disregard for law. To me, what’s telling is the pot hunters’ complete reduction of a culture and its members to “the good stuff”, the shrinking of life and its cultural contexts to mere “things” having market value.