Athletic cabalists heave their moonbeams
And joust amid the aqueous numbers,
Hooping a populous, opulent globe.
And I am merely the whimsical scribe
With a-tic-a-tac-ulating fingers,
Jotting down notes for cummerbunded Seuss
and running errands for bush-tail Potter.
And who will present the sporting adjective,
Like Baptist’s severed head on a platter?
And what star-glutted Brando will master,
What constellated Olivier emote
Such scrupulously scribbled scrivenings?
***
According to a paradox of Zeno
The hare will never catch the grinning tortoise.
To square the sum: a pair of dice at Reno
Often fails to win the gambler’s purpose.
The same is justly said of the martial word,
Which prematurely stakes its written claim:
The fundamental’s partials are left unheard
As Truth escapes its pre-established name.
Yes, I could wrap it neatly in a bonnet
And cash it in for payments in arrears –
But this is not a moralizing sonnet,
For a couplet at the end doth not appear.
***
Unless, of course, it overflows into
The subsequent unassuming stanza.
Whereupon the reader (though feeling no
Less cheated of the magnanimous rhyme)
May be left in good faith to decide for
Him or herself which facts were essential
And which were written merely as filler
To close the conspicuous gap between
The tireless pen and the eluding paper,
Stuck in a perpetual steeplechase,
In a timeless, unclocked catch-as-catch-can,
Scornful of bruised palms and the aching heel.
***
This is my customized testimony -
Another little book of days and numbers.
Glib musings for an equally glib age.
For I am just a chimerical goop,
Etched in a celestial cartoonery
And underwritten by a moon of legends,
Realizing that all will soon be well,
That the numberless progeny will return
With a cue from evening’s dauntless hero -
That the Purple Cow will bless us tonight,
And we will still be licking our forks and knives
As the cosmic jongleurs mount the rising stage.