11-21-2022, 02:50 AM
Research
At first you'll feel quite the detective, tracing
such a clean line through the confused web that is
your field, but then you'll start to feel
your insignificance, the weight
of all the time you spent reading those articles
for not much more than a bracketed number
bearing down on you like a badly built house
in an earthquake, and you'll find
this is not a journey you've made alone,
the corpus of references you've gathered becomes
a sort of canon, their authors a choir
of interceding saints: you'll realize the web
was an icon under construction,
your work a gilded tessera.
At first you'll feel quite the detective, tracing
such a clean line through the confused web that is
your field, but then you'll start to feel
your insignificance, the weight
of all the time you spent reading those articles
for not much more than a bracketed number
bearing down on you like a badly built house
in an earthquake, and you'll find
this is not a journey you've made alone,
the corpus of references you've gathered becomes
a sort of canon, their authors a choir
of interceding saints: you'll realize the web
was an icon under construction,
your work a gilded tessera.