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
Whittled down the poplar shafts
Where needed, gently bending flat
Rub them smooth upon that flap of thresher-sharkshin
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 cave wall 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
A funny thing occurs:
It's the first time a child of mine
Has grown past the age of ten
Making me the younger one
Rocks go sliding into air
Hands of cloud ruffle our hair
As we climb the bluff towards the entrance of the beast's lair
Near the top, we hunker down in the glitching rime
Of a thistle bush, to wait for him there
Seconds, minutes, hours drip away
Down the darkened porchway
Azure dissolves to pink
And just as we begin to think
About giving up and heading home
There comes a fearful music
Draw back your bow and slow your lungs
When the cross glows, release your hungry arrow
I hear you whisper "No"
Your arrow falls limp in the snow
The monster retreats
You wipe the tears from my cheek
Isagog is my daughter
And I am called Temperance