Forgery

John Fowler, "In Little Death Hollow Canyon," 2015

It’s just that this poem, these words, my
alphabets, are forgeries. The provenance
smells right—redolent of crushed gravel,
resin and eye-sting of cedar pollen, dried
mud—but they’re intended to fool us into
feeling what’s not there, lead us to believe
(myself most of all) in this edited world.
Any real thing is unfixable, evanescent, if
it’s real at all; what I share’s a simulacrum.

And yet, and yet, there’s something else
here: an indelible ink, passed from mouth
to mouth, hand to hand, flashflood washing
down through this dry slot canyon, up then
splashing over my poor thin fakery, making
it as real as any world that holds us both.