Overture

When I think back upon the time I spent

With Arthur, and the mystery he leant

To those of us afforded with the chance

Of sharing vicinage, and seen askance

By all the rest who saw the distance for

A vague mirage, or elsewise would implore

A star was but a speck of light whereas

For those up close engulfed whole worlds and has

The power both to swallow and produce

Creations and to render tightness loose;

When I think back, I say, the firmament

Folds liquefactions of the occident,

Begetting what is at first minstrelsy

But augments into boundless artistry.

On either side did antecedents claim

A namesake of the artist; and the same

Two bloods forsook their safety for a war

Fought o’er Britannia’s skies and facing shore

Till one begot a baker who amassed,

From Greensleeves to the strains but lately passed,

An oeuvre of such songs as would entrance

A faun of afternoon’s own sweetly dance;

Anon excurse thence did he, westward bound,

Toward the prairies, yet unto the crowned

White mountaintops did his son (ours) seek out

To freely breathe the golden rays about,

To intermix them with the alder shades

From home, distilling all into cascades

Born out by nature, and heard from afar

As beauty’s murmurs from a lone guitar.

And now to close the overture I play

My encore. As night melts into the day

So in the end I see that I’ve begun

The song again—totality is one

Lone ever-present ever-stirring breath,

A silence-swelling life-displacing death

Exhaled as birth, and thus is cycled there,

Or here, the stagnancy of swirling air.

And as I now, like Arthur’s ear, extract

With eye the artistry as rays refract

About me; stood amidst—my player’s gait

Betrays I concomitantly spectate

And forbye must perform what writes the pen—

And as I now, I’ll now think back again.