Over the Cardboard Seas

Only we can forget

What we’ve learned since those days,

Then expect them to know

What we think we know now,

What they should have known then,

How all songs get written—

Only a canvas sky

Over a muslin tree.

Sometimes we do forget

What’s real, what’s fakery,

Since both, usually,

Get up to trickery,

But we never have lacked

For etymologies,

Even when we lacked them.

No creative force

Is more exuberant

In raw humanity

Than making up stories,

Even for divine names,

Nothing, perhaps, except

All the greed and babies.

One: to compose a trope.

Two: a liturgical

Embellishment. Three: turn.

Four: song. Five: to disturb.

Greek, Latin, Arabic,

All lost the roads that led

To the French troubadours.

Etyma. All the names

For moon that have stories

Of their own, all only

Their paper moons sailing.