The piper at the gate hails the dawning
Of a new day a new dispensation
As occurs each day and in every moment
The gate stays not open perennially
Nor is its sequacious beckoning seen
Save by them who train their optics upon
And cultivate the sweet pleasures of sight
If of biotic eye or more endeared
Through the living spectacles of the soul
And each moment so slender and fine
Serves as asymptote of mere nothingness
And hence of what amounts to the same thing
Unspeakable infinity sublime
But let’s not speak of that for we have more
Pressing business in this fluxuant world
With gracious plenitude of sight and sound
And hence we act as scratchers of surfaces
And make rubbings of headstones of the past
Amateurs and dilettantes deliberate
To take delight and love the world of things
And wield tools of conviviality
And all on our lonesome to sound our bar-
Baric yawp the yawp conventionally
Regarded as the barbaric manner
Firm civilization’s mannerism
The lore of the grandmother’s grandmother
The witchery of herb and ballad sad
For nought is new but all is renewal
And me and thee might disagree on this
If theft depletes what it battens upon
My claiming the charge of plagiarism
A publisher’s cudgel wielded for gain
And Joyce reduce tales of brave Ulysses
And Dante hire Virgil as Passepartout
And Carson rifle mournful Catullus
As Mantuan rifled deep-browed Homer
For lo the regicidal bard exploits
The quest of sad Aeneas for the tract
That will assert eternal Providence
And justify the ways of punishment
And should we then adopt arbitrary
Stricture against an unstressed syllable
At the end of a pentameter line
Who serve iambickish pentametroid
For whom verse can never be blank enough
Decorum is all and propriety
And the mot juste and the well-tempered tone
Finely calibrated connotation
Rhetoric appropriate to trouble
To triumph to unappeasable loss
The right volume color taste and grit
Ma très cher semblable ma très belle sœur
Our stockings are boldly blue it’s true
But easily capacious for roygiv
And ultra and infra who knows how far
A sense accommodating sensibility
A world in which punishment fits the crime
A world that is of imagination
In which a hardheaded Yankee
Prognosticates in mythic court eclipse
And Stonewall Jackson’s ghost can suck the souls
Of news teams ganged on sacred battlefield
And chords for the Banks of the Ohio
And the recipe for fruitcake cookies
The nourishing bosom that is the past
And you can bend the shape of the recipe
A line one beat short of an alexandrine
And break a chord into arpeggio
And probably invite dismal failure
And wrack your brain in frustration dire
And cry in indignation ‘gainst the walls
That block our progress toward who knows where
The library of Alexandria
Gone
Do we need the lost book on comedy
Since Aristotle is known as mostly wrong
Well yeah we kind of do as it turns out
For the worst book ever might hold a jewel
The passing show of the fluxuant world
Frustrates not so much as ephemeral
But as obstacle to comprehensiveness
As resistance trains mind and muscle
And if no wall then no gate to pass through