Classic Poem

Your teeth are the fair excessive coast
along which smiles by compass navigate
as the tossings of sober gaiety list.

You smile gradually, as in the mantling
current of the tide sea-water smiles,
and totally, like an attempted Fiat
Lux for the night of mortals that behold you.
Your teeth are thus a jewel of great price.

Care them with care, for in such care inheres
no less transcendence than when a Pontiff touches
up his encyclic and burnishes his crook.

Care your teeth, conclave of hailstones, train
of foam, exhaustless ore, areopagus
of perfect astronomical minutiae,
manna sating retina and hunger
of the Twelve Tribes that hang upon your lips.

Your teeth in a rebellion would obtain
to serve the despot as zodiacal missiles
and turn discordant howls into a choral,
riot and fury into harmless frolics,
the insurgents into a concourse of the blind.

Under the secret arcades of your gums,
as in an infinitesimal aqueduct,
the worthiest mortal might with dignity
appease his parched desires . . . until the thunder
at the Last Judgement of the angel's trump.

Since all fair amulets are by the earth
engulfed, and since your idol's teeth must yet
glisten in the grim skeleton's grisly grin,
I enshrine them here, their clean design
and their divine nobility, for the amaze
and glory of gyratory mankind.