On Being assigned to Read Suzanna and Peter Quince at the Clavier

Preface

We'll take a poem
& make love to it Wallace,
As you too take your scripture
& temper too nature's rapture.

I. Wallace. (The Thief)

You play the flute & feelings too
& point to the simile of things
            Seeming,
       Nay, being to be;
The Old wanting the New
       The song that remains the same,
       The story that replays the game.

II. The Princess

The Nympthette, The goddess,
        Bathsheba
by her pool

All push the keys that bring the old in man
        to pillage,
nay, rape that which cymbals please.

II. The Broken Lock

The Portal
Which Pluto Plummets
With His Persephone
Visits wakeful sleeps
of young boys dreams

While a Professor's Pitched
Voice, Drenched Green & White,
Tells too, Is too, the same
Dream & Melody's
Of The Elders & Peter's Clavier.

III. Beauty's Truth

Is of the moment, as in the flesh,
as in the piety of Suzanna's praise

& not the lust which fouls foolish men
(to a dogs lick or the stiffened neck)

IV.  To this our bodies lay dying

But the spirit of our stories lives on,
In the Clothes of a Poem,

In an Urn that deserves an Ode,
In the Misery of Two;

The boys pitch that
provokes old art anew.

Love is the rook
between the two.