She went to his head like a double martini at a bar
Where gangsters gather after a hit. She wanted his baby.
They sat at a corner table, quarreling about money,

No gentle way of breaking the news: you turn on the TV
And see the rocket’s red glare: the capsule explodes,
The astronauts tumble down, and the anchorpeople

The poet sits quietly looking around.
Then galloping, galloping, galloping
out of his old age, into the sweet reply

Late in the century, Chaucer stretches
having just finished with his reckonings
in wool, checking them all against the chits

She feared hell, loved heaven, and the angel’s tooth
that gnaws away the flesh with temperance—
think of this woman, who was half a saint,

These good New Yorkers bent low over books
deserve a Paradise of softer chairs
and sleep, their heads against that fringed and white

Above, the red clay cliff, and above that,
a fringe of scrub grass and the overall sky.
Propped against great stones, boulders with ledges

When the high-pitched sounds of the August continuo
circulated like breezes through the immovable heat,
time was a single leaf drifting upwards, then down.

I have dreamt a dream of fulfillment, of freedom:
she was an old woman, with a face like the moon,
first full with reflection, then new and dark, and then

Our text, class, is chaos. We are its authors. These words,
our illustration, are random and senseless, until the rules
to reveal their sense are revealed, or invented, like the laws of cells,