I can feel each cloud as a thing
and seem to touch its turrets and to think
           the great curve of its birth

Well let’s assume it’s yes, but this is not a conversation
for the telephone, you know, our ears
have vigilant listeners, so let’s just prepare it in

What is a verse not to be thought
in the oval rows of the stadium, where
crowded

Somebody’s aunt out swabbing her birdbath
with Lysol and the town paper mill down the block
is beginning to blister in a clean shock

You must remove your sleepmask, haul it
from your eyes, sleep a white sleep without
slapping floodwaters—let it go,

On the banks of the beautiful Loire,
There was my birth and my cradle.
Two kinds of goods flow from that land:

Now I will tell Meader’s story; I have a moral in view.
He was pestered by a Grizzly so bold and malicious
That he used to snatch caribou meat from the eaves of the cabin.

Faithful mother tongue
I have been serving you.
Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors

I will not grace you with a name...Even “you”, however modest the convention: not here.
No need here for that much presence. Let “you” be “she”, and let the choice, incidentally,
be dictated not by bitterness or fear—a discretion, simply, the most inoffensive decorum.

Winsome Bob meets Katherine & drops Nancy.
Nancy burrows even deeper
into her studies of semiology, at Yale.