The Poet Orders His Tomb

By Edgar Bowers 1924–2000 Edgar Bowers

I summon up Panofskv from his bed

Among the famous dead

To build a tomb which, since I am not read,

Suffers the stone’s mortality instead;

Which, by the common iconographies

Of simple visual ease,

Usurps the place of the complexities

Of sound survivors once preferred to noise:

Monkeys fixed on one bough, an almost holy

Nightmarish sloth, a tree

Of parrots in a pride of family,

Immortal skunks, unaromatically;

Some deaf bats in a cave, a porcupine

Quill-less, a superfine

Flightless eagle, and, after them, a line

Of geese, unnavigating by design;

Dogs in the frozen haloes of their barks,

A hundred porous arks

Aground and lost, where elephants like quarks

Ape mother mules or imitation sharks—

And each of them half-venerated by

A mob, impartially

Scaled, finned, or feathered, all before a dry

Unable mouth, symmetrically awry.

But how shall I, in my brief space, describe

A tomb so vast, a tribe

So desperately existent for a scribe

Knowingly of the fashions’ diatribe,

I who have sought time’s memory afoot,

Grateful for every root

Of trees that fill the garden with their fruit,

Their fragrance and their shade? Even as I do it,

I see myself unnoticed on the stair

That, underneath a clear

Welcome of bells, had promised me a fair

Attentive hearing’s joy, sometime, somewhere.

Edgar Bowers, “The Poet Orders His Tomb” from Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Copyright © 1997 by Edgar Bowers. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Edgar Bowers.

Source: Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)

Biography

Edgar Bowers was born in 1924 in Rome, Georgia and earned his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Drafted into the army during World War II, he was active in the de-Nazification of Germany, and was stationed for a year at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s retreat in the Alps. After the war, he earned his MA and PhD from Stanford, where he studied closely with Yvor Winters. Both his experiences of Europe during the war . . .

Continue reading this biography