I summon up Panofskv from his bed <br />Among the famous dead <br />To build a tomb which, since I am not read, <br />Suffers the stone’s mortality instead; <br /> <br /> <br />Which, by the common iconographies <br />Of simple visual ease, <br />Usurps the place of the complexities <br />Of sound survivors once preferred to noise: <br /> <br /> <br />Monkeys fixed on one bough, an almost holy <br />Nightmarish sloth, a tree <br />Of parrots in a pride of family, <br />Immortal skunks, unaromatically; <br /> <br /> <br />Some deaf bats in a cave, a porcupine <br />Quill-less, a superfine <br />Flightless eagle, and, after them, a line <br />Of geese, unnavigating by design; <br /> <br /> <br />Dogs in the frozen haloes of their barks, <br />A hundred porous arks <br />Aground and lost, where elephants like quarks <br />Ape mother mules or imitation sharks— <br /> <br /> <br />And each of them half-venerated by <br />A mob, impartially <br />Scaled, finned, or feathered, all before a dry <br />Unable mouth, symmetrically awry. <br /> <br /> <br />But how shall I, in my brief space, describe <br />A tomb so vast, a tribe <br />So desperately existent for a scribe <br />Knowingly of the fashions’ diatribe, <br /> <br /> <br />I who have sought time’s memory afoot, <br />Grateful for every root <br />Of trees that fill the garden with their fruit, <br />Their fragrance and their shade? Even as I do it, <br /> <br /> <br />I see myself unnoticed on the stair <br />That, underneath a clear <br />Welcome of bells, had promised me a fair <br />Attentive hearing’s joy, sometime, somewhere.<br /><br />Edgar Bowers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-poet-orders-his-tomb/
