Each good word is from its curriculum estranged,
else high-capitol’d Truth be a painted
village and its keeper but a sham Potemkin.
Seraphs reassemble the manageried runes,
craft them in their painstaking idiom.
The embroidering digits to no undoubted
avail release themselves in numismatic flights,
in search of an old mellifluity.
At intervals the wolf-tone bears its bestial teeth,
frightening the scarcely authored flits of beauty
into a tonic’s buttressed collective,
from which we begin again, and again begin.
Would that this gaunt wolf were hunted elsewhere, who now
ranges along the cardboard balustrades
as binocular’d sophists climb from rung to rung.
[Previous: At Rehearsal A]
[Next: Left with the Helves]