Implements from the "Tomb of the Poet"

On the journey to the mundane afterlife,

You travel equipped to carry on your trade:

A bronze, small-toothed saw to make repairs,

The stylus and the ink pot and the scraper,

Wax tablets bound into a little book.

Here is the tortoise shell for the cithara,

Bored through with holes for strings, natural sound box.

Here is the harp's wood triangle, all empty—

The sheep-gut having long since decomposed

Into a pure Pythagorean music.

The beeswax, frangible with centuries,

Has puzzled all your lyrics into silence.

I think you were a poet of perfection

Who fled still weighing one word with another,

Since wax forgives and warms beneath revision.