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.