“Lowell, who was the most exhaustingly literary person I’d ever met, I’ve always considered the master of rhetoric. He told me once that he worked over a line ‘until it sounds like Lowell.’”

He gazed into the air, searching for a word in my language.
I blinked. Across the pool a zephyr stirred, in my language.

Where was I? Where was he? Where he looked, remembering?

Another cow was floating by us,
hilariously calm, bell-deep 
in milkweed and tansy. She looked