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.