at non effugies meos iambos
If I were to wipe away the constellations from the sky,
You alone would shine,
There in that,
Devoid of all the light,
Which too often clutters
Your radiance and your mind.
And lightheartedly I say this,
While scrawling desires on yellowing pages,
Which I hand out at random
(et ad absurdum).
And throwing little glances,
Lost in endless distance
Or translation.
There is a grand complexity to sight and sound
Which I with my inherent limitations
Fail to grasp.
Depictions wrought by my hands
Could never do the forms of these things
Proper justice.
And instead of facsimile
They become ruined.
And so I blur the lines
Between the real and perceived
As done with paltry sketches,
When the artist has no more good to do,
And so becomes not a bearer of beauty
But a butcher.
I write dis
Jointed poesy
With you in mind.
(No better subject could I find.)
And fill the lines,
And fatten the meter out
With syllables and sibyls
With diacritical marks and dieresis
And critical remarks
By means of
Playing knucklebones with words.
But I’m no Anacreon,
Or Tibullus,
Or Sappho.
And though I may be just a boy reading Catullus,
Anachronistically,
My poems are just as good
Had I been
A wordsmith
Like Wordsworth.
(at non effugies meos iambos)