Implements from the "Tomb of the Poet"

Piraeus Archeological Museum On the journey to the mundane afterlife, You travel equipped to carry on your trade: A bronze, small-toothed saw to make repairs, The stylus and the ink pot and the scraper, Wax tablets bound into a little book. Here is the tortoise shell for the cithara, Bored through with holes for strings, natural sound box. Here is the harp's wood triangle, all empty— The sheep-gut having long since decomposed Into a pure Pythagorean music. The beeswax, frangible with centuries, Has puzzled all your lyrics into silence. I think you were a poet of perfection Who fled still weighing one word with another, Since wax forgives and warms beneath revision.