"The Poet Orders His Tomb" by Edgar Bowers

Edgar Bowers was an American poet from Georgia who died in 2000. He relied on French poets for inspiration and his limited poetic works were produced in traditional rhyme and form. 

Key terms: rhyme, meter, 

The Poet Orders His Tomb

I summon up Panofskv from his bed  
    Among the famous dead
To build a tomb which, since I am not read,  
Suffers the stone’s mortality instead;

Which, by the common iconographies  
    Of simple visual ease,
Usurps the place of the complexities
Of sound survivors once preferred to noise:

Monkeys fixed on one bough, an almost holy  
    Nightmarish sloth, a tree
Of parrots in a pride of family,
Immortal skunks, unaromatically;

Some deaf bats in a cave, a porcupine  
    Quill-less, a superfine
Flightless eagle, and, after them, a line  
Of geese, unnavigating by design;

Dogs in the frozen haloes of their barks,  
    A hundred porous arks
Aground and lost, where elephants like quarks  
Ape mother mules or imitation sharks—

And each of them half-venerated by  
    A mob, impartially
Scaled, finned, or feathered, all before a dry  
Unable mouth, symmetrically awry.

But how shall I, in my brief space, describe  
    A tomb so vast, a tribe
So desperately existent for a scribe
Knowingly of the fashions’ diatribe,

I who have sought time’s memory afoot,  
    Grateful for every root
Of trees that fill the garden with their fruit,  
Their fragrance and their shade? Even as I do it,

I see myself unnoticed on the stair
    That, underneath a clear
Welcome of bells, had promised me a fair  
Attentive hearing’s joy, sometime, somewhere.

This poem is difficult for me. I think I like it, but I can't be sure because I'm really quite baffled. I can say that the narrative mainly has to do with a poet ordering his tomb- not to be silly, because this is explicit in the title, but that the poet is actually describing what his tomb should look like after his death. I tried to do some quick research on this poem and could only find another poem entitled "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church," in which a bishop describes his tomb. It seems possible that this poem is an allusion to that one, and perhaps Bowers is making the statement that it is difficult for a poet to order his tomb because of all of abstractness of the poet's work: "How shall I, in my brief space, describe / A tomb so vast..." The rest of the poem does seem like a lot of description, perhaps meant to be an attempt at describing the tomb. I'm not sure. I have a feeling this one requires a little more research, especially on "Panofskv" (who is probably Panofsky with a typo) Can anyone help?

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/171960