There wasn't time to describe what time
Was doing to the description. The slow
Was what confused us all. We thought it
Stopped. We gave it names. We thought
Names stopped. We thought we stopped
At stable places, time to time, and rested.
Slow time filled our sleepy heads
With dreams sometimes of never, no time.
A page from an anthology of emblems,
From the heyday of the emblem craze
Four centuries or so ago, showed three
Clues, one a woodcut, one a Latin adage,
One a witty couplet in Italian. Imagine
A child who read neither Latin nor Italian
Coming upon a reprint of that page
On someone's coffee table. What to make
Of the angelic hourglass filled, not
With grains of sand but bonbons vaguely
Shaped like skulls? The child would think
The goal would be to break the angel
Hourglass surmounted by face and wings,
Get at the candy and find out how it tasted.
No comments:
Post a Comment