and spare your arm a bone-bisecting slice
if you can match his wit by improvising
a song right now. The usual rhapsodizing
won’t do this time: you must compose the story,
not merely draw it from your repertory.
Can you match his wit? The time is now.
The bard struggled to determine how
the story should begin. Words wouldn’t come.
Language wasn’t a lyre he could strum.
Language—he never felt its being before
for all his mastery of metaphor.