I'll be damned! Here's a thing I haven't seen in years!
The wooden plank, the powder keg, the fuse…
It was given to me long ago by my peers.
Sure, I've a ton of things that have long sat unused:
colonial wigs, a sixties beehive…
Things that, once I'd done with, went back in the tool chest.
Thus did Shakespeare omit Falstaff from Henry V -
it was time to put the fat fool to rest!
But what's funny is that they all seem to remind
me of each other. This particular figure
calls up every odd thing I've left behind.
A pageant, a floating spectacle, a rigor
of trapdoors, pits, trapeze flips…Quite a potpourri
is memory's infinite tropery -
with being's fat Falstaff confounding the rigger!
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