- A -

In the Orient they say there was a tortoise
Swimming in the incoherent deep,
The world inscribed in runes upon his back.
The first of mankind watched it churning there
And read, they say, and knew it for a tortoise,
Knew himself for a man. Or else, they say,
Alef, sacred ox it was, first cause, uncaused,
Who bore the word into the world upon his horns,
There in the beginning, posing their dilemma.

You see that I know even less than you
Of beginnings. Perhaps it is enough to say
That time, which grants us space enough to see,
Will also grant us never to despair.
Read on then, while Arcturus chases year by year
He doesn’t know what: a dipper, a wagon, a bear.

- B -

Once there stood in a pye-eyed field
Open to the sun but plied with the weather,
A race, a rout of multi-purpose pansies,
A polynation of pansies, visited by bumbles,
Yellow jackets, wasps, and bees of all descriptions.

“And what do you want here?” the pansies said to the bees,
“And well you might ask us,” they answered.
“All the great noon long you stand here, nodding and blowing,
To no self-evident purpose, while we are busy being.
We have come here to teach you your essence.”
And thus it was that pansies learned to be roses,
Or lilies or jasmine, whatever smells good.
And now I must mention, at least, Jean Paul Sartre,
Who holds that nothing preceded the bee.
This, as every pansy knows, is blasphemy.

Editor’s note: Michael Stewart, professor of Linguistics at Ball State University in the 1970’s, was a scholar and bon vivante of note at the time, and his Alphabet Book bears the mark of a superb wit. Mid decade, he disappeared into the Germanies with his wife of Germanic origin, Barbara, never to be heard of again, at least by anyone we’ve located. We hold some hope that the publication of his poetry, at least that in the manuscript he left to us, will somehow make itself known to Dr. Stewart and he will arise and either thank us for their dissemination or sue us. Either way, we feel, we win.

Some readers may recall “Elemeno,” an ode to that odd letter combination in the middle of the alphabet, which we printed at the beginning of April. It will be repeated in sequence as we work through the manuscript.