The Poet Orders His Tomb

I summon up Panofskv from his bed

Among the famous dead

To build a tomb which, since I am not read,

Suffers the stone’s mortality instead;

Which, by the common iconographies

Of simple visual ease,

Usurps the place of the complexities

Of sound survivors once preferred to noise:

Monkeys fixed on one bough, an almost holy

Nightmarish sloth, a tree

Of parrots in a pride of family,

Immortal skunks, unaromatically;

Some deaf bats in a cave, a porcupine

Quill-less, a superfine

Flightless eagle, and, after them, a line

Of geese, unnavigating by design;

Dogs in the frozen haloes of their barks,

A hundred porous arks

Aground and lost, where elephants like quarks

Ape mother mules or imitation sharks—

And each of them half-venerated by

A mob, impartially

Scaled, finned, or feathered, all before a dry

Unable mouth, symmetrically awry.

But how shall I, in my brief space, describe

A tomb so vast, a tribe

So desperately existent for a scribe

Knowingly of the fashions’ diatribe,

I who have sought time’s memory afoot,

Grateful for every root

Of trees that fill the garden with their fruit,

Their fragrance and their shade? Even as I do it,

I see myself unnoticed on the stair

That, underneath a clear

Welcome of bells, had promised me a fair

Attentive hearing’s joy, sometime, somewhere.

Copyright Credit: Edgar Bowers, “The Poet Orders His Tomb” from Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Copyright © 1997 by Edgar Bowers. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Edgar Bowers.

Source: Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)