When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire,
one longs to hear the cry "Hygrometer!
Fresh hygrometer for sale!" Yes, and when the fair

Academia 1994: these dead white males
I've been hauling about in this brick of a box of a book
called Western Civilization—Homer, Plato, Melville,

No small feat for Grief to doff
his mourning cloak, the velvet
heft of it, and its scarlet naught

The elation of naming, that dispassionate
stance, of course it could not last. As all

Then the old paragon rose and spoke: “Until this week we had the luxury of playing with language. Now, everything is suddenly the same. We must use words, my compañeros, to construct towering forms, juggernauts of play. We must dismantle the family—you know which one—using these edifices. Only then will our children’s earnings and our

Jewel Avenue, Astoria and no other. No, no, traffic makes me this way Van Wyck Van Wyck. Why don’t you switch? Which kind of battery? Motorola? The brown one? The tiny one? The flat one? If you remember, you spend fifty dollars for nothing. Hello? Every day in a kind of golden mitt, but it turned out to be just another head cover. My dear Jewel

We stay in the apartment of a Croatian couple, husband and wife, both in love with our friend M.

We could be each other’s great tragedies had the world not slaked us already.

Tomás Luis de Victoria
moves very slow
in his motet

This is for you
Now that your curved wood chair
like a chair carved in Black Woods, Germany,