A Papyrologist Laments Lacunae You are gone. I am left. These, the only undisputed readings Of our fractured text.

All the rest is propped on dots Dots of doubt and imprecision, Like that over which the toddling indecision Of a question mark rises Dots we drop like bread-crumbs Beneath letters, tracing paths of surmises, That others to follow will squabble over, Like birds, will gobble in argument, Till all of us have lost our way, Because truth could not outlast the day, But rubbed off in times vast palimpsest, With all the rest, with all the rest. You are gone. I am left. This, the whole, sole certitude of the present text. And no miraculous power of conjecture Can part the perilous lacuna sea Barring all further clarity, Hemming me into slavery To what is lost. For loss, like lacunae, is filled only by what is gone, Consoled only by the old papyrologists hope, Who, even as he laments rising water-tables in the Fayyum, Gratefully looks to the western desert: still and patient as an undiscovered tomb.