This sixth circle is not a place to receive
many accolades, peopled with the likes found
in the backgrounds of famous paintings.

Like the cheap achievement of cold fusion,
Tarnished prince, six months ago today
Your thought experiment proved an illusion,

Time’s one-way traffic won’t reverse
Summer’s sentimental course
Or force the headlong universe

About the order of the groups
the squabble must have gone like this:
the singers said, We praise God

One tear not yet large enough to spill,
upwelling at the corner of an eye, may
delve with a root of salt inside the tongue,

Here, in the xeroxed panorama on my desk, a man
is crouching slightly in his spacesuit, leaning
forward, hands swung up, as though about to leap.

A man lies in a bed
in the room next to my own.
His small feet hang over the edge

of the lowercase, of indian pipes,
a locket of thumbnail photographs
that opens across the room,

Knowing then our appetite,
and the table laden with pleasures,
it was by design we were made,

Your clue’s in the way they tilt their faces, away.
Or others, shamefully close. A guzzler
will lean against your hand, muscle the cup.