Letras
Isagog is my daughter,
and I am called Temperance.
We live here together
in the old Roman villa.
Now is our evening lesson,
hunched in the candleflushed rubble of
this once-opulent atrium.
Whittle down the poplar shafts -
where needed gently bending flat -
rub them smooth upon that flap of thresher-sharkskin,
touch your newly-whetted scramsax to the thinnest end
and cut the nocks in.
Next with beeswax we glue on
the fletchings of a whooper swan,
make them fast with sinew wrought
from the void left by a horse.
The bones of our innocent dead
we'll fashion arrowheads.
She asks why we spend precious time
crafting our sheaves by hand
when we could acquire all we need
from the bastle at Beadnell
or one of the abundant Caskets of Parting Cloud
which every sundown
float to ground on their dark balloons.
I answer her as best I may:
That in a world such as today's
where each person can display
a bounty of data
on the quivering cavewall of their eyeball
at the merest flick of a lash,
the only facts of any worth
are not so easily dispersed.
Yes, it matters how we learn -
real knowledge must be earned...
Everything else is a husk:
wisdom's simulacrum.
To the interior we ride at pace,
the greyhounds swaddled in our laps,
sun blazing on our backs.
We dismount in mountainshade and go on foot, bows readied,
into the realm of the fabled Three-Faced Hare.
How gracefully she navigates
the craggy boulder-strewn terrain -
My best ever daughter is fast-flowing water.