The Löwenmensch (lion-man) figurine, is a prehistoric ivory sculpture discovered in Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in 1939. Determined by carbon dating of the layer in which it was found to be between 35,000 and 41,000 years old, it is one of the oldest-known example of an artistic representation and the oldest confirmed statue ever discovered.
—Wikipedia
He sits cross-legged in the slant-
light that cleaves a plane
in the cave floor, a line
that recedes with the sun
until he, too, must recede, deeper,
into the limestone throat,
to position himself
in the light of a fire
tended by a nursing female and
a lame male-child who
reclines against the fuliginous wall
of a side chamber, piping
on a bird-bone flute,
a resonant acoustic response
rounded against the stone
dome of the ceiling into
an ambient drone that
soothes him as he takes up his tools
and resumes his task, focusing
on that which cannot be
seen, that which must be
drawn forth in a therianthropic fusion
through the mind’s aperture,
lodged there, held, the unseen
refusing to be un-seen
through an unmeasured month of suns,
as the maker, excused from the hunt,
charged with making,
scrapes and carves with lithic flakes
a mammoth tusk, his hands
calloused, cramping, cut,
his blood staining the ivory,
his finger joints aching
through the rhythm of
duplicate movement,
transformed by it, made stronger
as the figure’s arms emerge, slowly,
from its sides, the friction
of flint burin displacing
a fine trickle of pungent
tusk-dust that coats his thighs
and the scrap of auroch hide
on which he sits, the patient
abrasion of the ivory
a transference of tactile
warmth, the first internal
stirrings of the object’s power, until
at last the head crowns
into his hands, felid, the alert
ears angled to hear his voice
and the voices of his band, as
this imagined thing,
this token, this lion-
man becomes complete, prepared
to inspire a pristine awe,
passed, as it will be, from hand
to hand through huddled generations,
eyes flickering in the glow
of night-fires, adjuvant
at the seam between realms,
its surface polished by contact
with flesh, a substantial sign of mind,
yet transitory as the blood-
spoor of a vanished kinsman
tracked to its terminus
in steppe grass, real
as the tale that springs
from such beholding,
and its molded telling, and the fear
in the belief that one can speak
to a possibly appeasable world.
