Chalkline
They have found the red chalk markings
on stones inside the pyramids,
the dust bright where it was strummed for
measure five millennia ago.
Nothing's straighter than a powdered
string pulled tight. And plucked against
a rock or board, as the builder
strikes the cord, it lays a line of
smoke, a boundary the one note
burns there, a temporary track
for saw and hammerer that's then
destroyed as the art conceals
itself and the maker hides in
the made or blows away like talc
and the structure looms whole and right.
