A protocol is the agreed-upon form that allows exchange to occur without the underlying chaos becoming visible—diplomatic, medical, military, the handshake before the negotiation, the anesthetic before the incision, the rules of engagement that permit two parties to interact without acknowledging what the interaction is actually costing them. Marriage is a protocol, and so is divorce, and so is the honeymoon in Rome where you haggle over a Pope in a snow dome outside the Vatican while your wife digs for lire in her purse, two thousand years after Christ drove the money-changers from the temple (with apparently limited long-term effect). The chapter opens in comedy because the first protocol—courtship, the honeymoon, the architecture of beginning—is the one where the form and the content are still roughly aligned, where the procedure and the feeling are moving in the same direction, where you can stand in the Pieta’s light and notice that Michelangelo has rendered Mary and Jesus with the smooth bodies of lovers in blissful repose. Comedy is what intimacy looks like before the protocols begin to diverge from what they were built to contain.
The chapter’s erotic argument runs deeper than the honeymoon’s comedy and surfaces most nakedly in the dream sequence that closes Honeymoon—the Penitent Magdalene, Donatello’s apocryphal figure, the guards reminding tourists not to touch, the museum’s protocol of aesthetic distance overlaid on a sculpture of a woman whose entire theological function is erotic renunciation. Noli me tangere: do not touch me, Christ says to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, the resurrection’s first act a rebuff, the most charged moment in the Christian narrative rendered as the withdrawal of contact at the instant of return. The chapter understands this as the central protocol of desire: the form that simultaneously invites and withholds, the structure that draws the body forward and then institutes the prohibition at the threshold. What the chapter tracks across its full arc is not the failure of love but the specific mechanism by which intimacy’s agreed-upon forms—courtship, devotion, the marriage bed, the dinner table’s last bottle—progressively diverge from the life they were designed to house, the procedure intact while the content drains, until the form is all that’s left, running on its own momentum, requiring nothing from either party except continued compliance.
The villanelle is the most obsessively repetitive structure in English poetry—nineteen lines, two refrains rotating through five tercets before locking into the final quatrain, the same words returning with accumulated weight each time, meaning shifting under repetition the way a word shifts when you say it too many times, the word losing its mooring and becoming pure sound before the meaning floods back wrong. Dylan Thomas used it for a dying father; Elizabeth Bishop used it for the art of losing. September Villanelle uses it for a marriage that completes itself across the full span of its form—proposal, wedding, friends made and lost, bitterness, the rote incantation of I love you said each night through the pain, and then the house empty and the money divided. The villanelle’s form does not distinguish between the beginning and the end, returns the same words to both, refuses to grant any moment more weight than any other. On the edge of a hill, on a warm day. There is nothing, not one thing that remains. The form holds what the speaker will not editorialize about, and the form’s refusal to grieve is itself the grief.
Protocols never chooses between its registers because the life it’s drawn from never offered that choice—the absurd and the devastating arrived together, occupied the same rooms, sat across from each other at the same tables, and the poems that hold both without flinching are not performing tonal sophistication but reporting conditions as they actually obtained. Comedy is the chapter’s other truth, equally weighted, equally earned, and the discipline of letting both stand without explanation or resolution is the same discipline that runs through every formal choice in the collection—the refusal to editorialize, to sentimentalize, to grant the reader the relief of knowing which feeling to have.
What accrues across the chapter is not a narrative of romantic failure but something more like a haunting—the gradual population of the rooms with presences that the protocols of intimate life were never designed to accommodate and cannot expel. The empty house of the closing poem is not metaphor but method: assign each pain its room, unfurnished and plain, enter when you must, leave when you regain the small composure absence makes its own. The ascetic discipline the poem recommends is the same discipline the chapter has been practicing all along—no sentimentality, no editorializing, no accounting of fault, only the precise notation of what the body keeps when the agreements have expired. Someone’s wife had thirteen ribs. The furniture was gone and Patsy Cline was drifting from the living room into the kitchen. The waiter stacked chairs. The clock ticked out of phase. These are the things the protocols leave behind when they finally stop running, and the chapter holds them without explanation, without consolation, without the mercy of a closed door—because the discipline of turning things away is not the same as turning them away, and the poems know the difference even when the speaker does not say so.
Honeymoon
Robert Altman used his actors’ practice takes as finals. He wanted the looseness that comes when a performer believes the camera isn’t yet counting, and he was not afraid to let a background figure drift into the foreground and swallow a line of important dialogue. Stanley Kubrick was his dark mirror: grueling repetition, every element locked, the most famous casualty being Shelley Duvall, subjected to a production schedule so relentless it broke something in her—and produced, in that breakage, one of the most compressed performances in American cinema. Tom Petty got the one perfect take holistically, the whole thing alive in a single breath; Barbra Streisand punches in syllable by syllable until the take is architecturally perfect—neither method wrong, neither producing the same truth. Honeymoon belongs to Petty and Altman. It was written in a fugue state—the same condition that produced St. Catherine’s Head while the author stood looking at her actual shriveled skull, Fountain Street while standing before a crucifix, and the First Coming, trying to fathom the Laocoön at the Vatican. First-hand encounters with the uncanny trigger something that formal revision cannot replicate and formal revision should not attempt to correct.
Florence has a clinical name for what happened to the author. Stendhal Syndrome—also called Florence Syndrome, also called, by Florentines themselves, the Tourist Disease—is a psychosomatic condition first documented in 1989 by Dr. Graziella Magherini, chief of psychiatry at the city’s Santa Maria Nuova hospital, who observed more than a hundred tourists hospitalized after overdosing on Florentine art. Rapid heartbeat, disorientation, hallucinations, temporary collapse of identity. The typical casualty: an impressionable person between twenty-six and forty, stressed by travel, possibly jet-lagged, arriving in a city that functions as a single overwhelming delivery mechanism for the Western tradition—like meeting all your heroes at once, in one afternoon, in one square mile, with no intermission. The Bargello, Duomo, Loggia, Pitti Palazzo, San Lorenzo, Uffizi: years of Renaissance study in a classroom, and now the axons and dendrites are actually firing, connecting, igniting, the soup of images that will eventually flow down the Arno in the poem’s final line. This poetic travelogue was where this entire collection began; Hallucinations was already in the diagnosis.
The Western tradition is haunted by the chthonic—the pre-Apollonian darkness that surges up through every Venus, every David, every Pietà whether the patron wanted it there or not. The Renaissance never fully Christianized it and the Church never fully suppressed it. What Michelangelo achieved in the Pietà is not devotional sculpture; it is the erotic charge of smooth stone, reposed limbs, bodies in intimate contact, desire and grief sharing the same nerve. The Church commissioned it, but the body insisted on something older. Paganism never died in Italy; it went underground and came back wearing vestments. The poem’s first sonnet names this directly—there is a perverse energy to Rome—and locates it precisely inside St. Peter’s, where saints and martyrs vie for attention / in the tapestries, frescoes, and friezes: not spiritual instruction but appetite-engine, spectacle of the flesh, the sacred and the commercial locked in the same permanent mutual contamination that Rome has been generating since before Constantine. The young American from Orlando, arriving from the land of theme parks and strip malls, is not naive about spectacle; he is naive about density. There is no American equivalent for what two thousand years of uninterrupted civilization does to a square mile of real estate.
The poem moves the way Altman’s camera moves—not in service of narrative progression but in service of reality as the mind actually processes it. In film, a canted angle signals danger or disorientation; Honeymoon would be filmed consistently in Dutch angles, because something extraordinary or unsettling is always waiting around the next corner. The jump cut—that glorious revelation of the French New Wave, Godard’s demolition of the establishing shot and the manicured story progression—is the poem’s structural logic. Handheld, shooting from the hip, continuity up for grabs, lighting changing from scene to scene, the camera free to linger on the ticket seller after the principals have walked away. That ticket seller daydreaming, doing nothing in particular, belonging to no plot—this is the European cut’s gift to cinema: the willingness to stay with the moment that has no narrative function, because that moment is where the experience actually lives.
Sonnet I opens in the grammar of deflation—Christ’s righteous violence against commerce reversed two thousand years later into its perfect irony: the speaker haggling over a Pope in a snow dome / as my wife digs for Lire in her purse. The temple-cleansing arrives not as scripture but as setup, the sacred turned into the occasion for kitsch. Rome has always generated the profane; the sacred and the commercial are not in tension here but in symbiosis, each requiring the other, the basilica and the souvenir stand sharing the same metabolism. The two-thousand-year gap is not awe, but rather the punchline the city delivers straight-faced, without apology, every day.
The Pietà passage is the sonnet cycle’s thermal core. What the eye encounters in that marble is the full erotic-sacred circuit running at maximum current: smooth bodies in blissful repose / like lovers having a post-coital smoke—the poem’s own words, arriving without apology, naming what the eye already suspects. What makes the eye hesitate is not the sacred and the profane in collision but something more precise: a mother too young, a son too beautiful, a grief too intimate for the distance theology requires. The comparison to lovers after sex does not demean the Pietà—it names what Michelangelo understood, which is that the body does not divide neatly into sacred and profane registers. Beauty has always known the body as a site where desire and grief are indistinguishable. The foam of saints and martyrs competing for attention afterward is not spiritual overdose. It is Rome doing what Rome does: feeding the appetite it created, the Church as the greatest spectacle of flesh the Western world has ever produced.
Sonnet II tips the erotic charge onto the human scale. Joah points to a handsome youth and swoons: / “I could see him in an underwear ad.” For the remainder of the afternoon the speaker carries the image—the slight Italian man / in boxer briefs, tensing for a camera—the body braced in restrained readiness, anticipating contact that will not arrive. This is Honeymoon‘s governing erotic condition from this point forward: desire held at threshold, the charge building without discharge, Eros operating under the same prohibition that the sacred art has been encoding all afternoon. The Wozzeck backstage sequence—the sweating lead blotting his armpits, Zubin Mehta fielding questions as the machinery of artifice dismantles around him—is the Pietà’s underside: the same spectacle, stripped of its vestments, revealed as labor and sweat and a body doing a job. The couplet’s mislabeled Englishman—“Bloody well should. I’m from England”—is the poem’s first explicit joke about the gap between what something is called and what it is.
On the train back to Florence, the Stendhal Syndrome completes its work. My wife rests / as the cypress trees outside the window / gradually recede into the mist / then fade altogether in the shadows—this is not a pastoral interlude but the nervous system finally surrendering to what it has been absorbing all day. The Pope enters the square in a white Jeep, comically ascending the marble steps / like Ernest Hemingway on safari, / his arms shaking as he reached out to bless / the frightened children: spectacle and frailty in the same body simultaneously, the sacred office and the failing flesh refusing to separate. Then actual sleep, and a woman in the desert / wandering in the sand with a hair shirt surfacing from the left side of consciousness—penitence entering at the threshold of dream, the body’s own counterweight to the afternoon’s erotic accumulation. Jolted awake at the station, reaching for a pen before the vision dissolves: this is the fugue state’s method, the same method that produced the poem itself.
Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene arrives as the cycle’s pivot. She is a figure so stripped of conventional beauty that she becomes overwhelming—emaciated, hair-covered, bent in a contrapposto of longing that has eaten itself. She exists at the exact point where the erotic and the penitent collapse into each other: the body that has been through everything desire can do to it and come out the other side as something the Church calls holy and the eye calls ravaged and the hand wants to touch. The museum guard’s rote prohibition—please do not touch—migrates without announcement into scripture: Noli me tangere, Christ’s withdrawal from the Magdalene at the tomb, the divine withheld at the moment of reunion. The poem names this convergence precisely: their words now took the shape of a poem—not a conceit, not a metaphor, but the moment language acquires body, the rote admonition and the sacred gesture discovered to be the same gesture.
The final sonnet removes the human speaker and gives the voice to the wood. I was uprooted by Donatello— / my trunk carved into a woman’s body, / bent in an eternal contrapposto, / and christened the Apocryphal Mary—the walnut speaks from inside its own object-hood, and what it reports is waiting. Where I stood unmolested many years: unmolested carrying its double current without apology, untouched in the custodial sense and unredeemed in the theological sense, the same prohibition and the same longing held in suspension. When a great flood broke through the doors, the greatest works of Florentine art floated through the city together—Cimabue’s yellow Jesus / and Ghiberti’s gold Gates of Paradise—the Magdalene suddenly animate in water, joining a procession she was never invited to join. This is Altman’s tracking shot, held past the point where the plot needs it: the camera lingering on the objects after their custodians have fled, the sacred artifacts adrift together, all equally displaced, all equally freed from their vitrines and their guards and their prohibitions. Please do not touch dissolved into floodwater. The Arno carrying the accumulated soup of the afternoon—the Bargello, the Duomo, the Loggia, the Pope’s shaking arms, the Italian in boxer briefs, the Wozzeck tenor blotting his armpits—all of it in motion together, the meaning assembling in the current, arriving nowhere, which is exactly where Altman’s camera always ends up, and exactly where this poem was always going.
The Arrangement
The Lowell epigraph — yet why not say what happened? — arrives as a question the poem will spend fourteen lines refusing to answer. The invitation to plain speech is set as the governing frame, then systematically denied. What follows is not confession but procedure: a room reassembling itself after an event the speaker will not name, clocks and smoke and sheets doing the emotional work the voice declines to perform.
The opening quatrain depersonalizes through mechanism. The clock reclaims the room; smoke thins; glasses dry; sheets uncrease, objects acting while the speaker observes. What loosened learns its seam—the line operates as physical law, the way a body returns to posture after release—and it is the poem’s first hint that what happened involved bodies. Your breath goes even. Nothing touches, clings. The grammar of absence: contact already withdrawn, reported in the present tense as if cataloguing inventory.
The second quatrain introduces temporal uncertainty, which is also a form of ethical evasion. The cat cry may have been earlier—before the light was killed, before the second pour, before the watch came off beside the door. Killed is the poem’s most violent verb, its violence redirected onto a lamp rather than the person in the room. The reverse chronology does not move toward origin so much as away from it, each before retreating further from the moment that would require acknowledgment. The watch beside the door is the poem’s most loaded domestic detail: clothing removed in sequence, the sequence implying intention, the intention never stated.
The third quatrain reframes the governing metaphor. The minute hand doesn’t merely mark time—it returns what it displaced, which is a description of mechanical reversal functioning as moral anatomy. What time gives back is not absolution but inventory: the words rehearsed, the pause calibrated, the bedroom clock running slightly wrong, the name the speaker didn’t ask to be withdrawn. Not the name she said but the name I didn’t ask you to withdraw—complicity located in silence, in the failure to interrupt, in the geometry of what was not done rather than what was.
The couplet arrives not as verdict but as temporal coordinate. At last the hour yields what started this—time releasing the origin point the whole poem has been circling—and what it yields is: a body standing where it wasn’t yet a kiss. The revision from the earlier draft (shouldn’t have been kissed) is structurally decisive. Shouldn’t would have introduced moral law from outside the poem’s system; wasn’t yet stays inside the poem’s logic of sequence and prematurity. The body stood at a threshold. The threshold was crossed. The poem declines to adjudicate this, locating the failure entirely in the grammar of not yet—a sequence violated rather than a prohibition broken. The speaker remains inside procedural knowledge, which is a different and colder thing than guilt.
As the first panel of its diptych with The Romantic, the poem’s silence is structural. It establishes that the event had a correct sequence, that the sequence was knowable at the time, and that the speaker knew it. When The Romantic subsequently performs its rhetorical heat—its aestheticized self-accounting—the reader already holds the other poem’s silence as a countermeasure. The Arrangement does not judge; it simply records what the mechanism returned, and the judgment belongs to the ordering.
The Romantic
The Hardwick epigraph—what matters is not confession, but judgment—frames a speaker who will spend twenty-eight lines confessing and arriving nowhere near judgment, invoking the standard precisely to evade it.
The first sonnet opens in the grammar of self-persuasion. I tell myself the house is only wood—the telling already signals failure; what requires that much insistence is not believed. God’s boredom leaks through the roof, which places cosmic indifference and domestic decay on the same axis. By dusk the house tilts into a confessional door ajar—inviting and accusing simultaneously, the two functions of a space built for guilt. She stands at the kitchen counter haloed by cheap bulbs. The departure is consecrated by the cheapest available light, which makes her leaving a kind of low-rent sainthood and makes him its witness rather than its cause.
The terrazzo patterns appear to weave the shadows together even as they pull apart. The speaker watches the optical illusion and records it—the floor doing the emotional work his syntax refuses. Even as holds the contradiction open: connection and separation happening in the same moment, the speaker perceiving both and intervening in neither. The confession follows without comprehension. Forgive me—though I never learned for what—this is guilt without object, the emotional reflex of a man who registers the wrongness of a situation but cannot locate the mechanism. His tongue tastes penny metal, sin reduced to small denomination. We’re fine, he says, and the lie cracks like plaster in a cold spot—a domestic correlative for structural failure, the house’s material betraying the speaker’s verbal surface. The evening fills the room and light recedes from a familiar wound: this wound has been here before, has a name, is not surprising. The sonnet ends not in devastation but in recognition—which is the worse arrival.
The second sonnet shifts the scene to a chipped green table and shifts the mode from lyric to document. He is writing with the sun behind his back—turned away from light, composing in shadow, the positioning announced as if it were neutral when it is the poem’s central admission. The Formica is rough and cold as a hospital tray: antiseptic, clinical, a surface for triage. The brightest flecks reflect light like sins he cannot retract—beauty and guilt occupying the same visual field, the speaker aestheticizing even his evidence against himself.
Can you be saved?—her question lands as both theological and diagnostic. His response is to anatomize his own flaw: the maniacal habit of drafting grief into mythical shape, the compulsion to convert experience into form. He names this as the mechanism that left him split between attack and retreat, then immediately performs it again. What’s needed, he announces, is not revision—just the truth, and the truth he produces is a generalization about women and their unguarded poses, the grace note before the guillotine. The line externalizes precisely where the poem has been most careful to internalize. Whether the speaker can hear this or not is left unresolved—which is the correct choice, given that his entire mode of operation is self-awareness deployed in service of self-protection.
He tries again to mend the poem, stitch its prose. The doubling of the metaphor—mend and stitch—reveals the compulsion even in the act of diagnosing it. No sentence saves it; nothing here will close. The poem refuses its own closure, announces the refusal, and in doing so performs one final act of aestheticization—the inability to end becomes the ending. He has made the wound into a form.
As the second panel of the diptych, read after The Arrangement‘s procedural silence, the rhetoric here arrives already indicted. The reader knows what the room looked like from the other side. The confessional posture reads as the aestheticization it is. Judgment belongs to the ordering, not to either voice.
Monday Morning
The subtitle announces the method: or Ode to Countess Motorboat and Alexis (after Wallace Stevens). The domestic cat gets a name; so does Hubbard’s abandoned daughter. Stevens’s Sunday Morning opens with a woman on a porch in late November, pagan and unafraid of death, refusing the old pieties. This poem opens with a woman on a waterbed on a Monday, pushing her cat off the edge like a small sacrifice, her bedroom strewn with paperbacks annotated in red and cigarette butts in coffee tins. Stevens’s woman faces the void and achieves secular transcendence; this woman faces the curtains and drifts back to sleep, the deflation built into the substitution.
Section I establishes the poem’s governing optical logic. The silhouettes of figures visible through saffron curtains are simultaneously relics in amber, Greeks on a black-figure vase, and shadows thrown by light across a bookcase—a primitive diorama generated by morning sun. Behind her eyes, the sleeping mind projects an obverse world, its abstract contours the inside of the same process. The two projections—the room’s accidental shadow-theater and the mind’s dream-architecture—are equivalent, neither more real than the other. The Platonic cave arrives here as domestic accident rather than philosophical allegory: the figures are just passersby, the light just morning, the mind just sleeping. Obverse is the precise word—not inverse, not opposite, but the other face of the same coin.
Section II moves the dreaming mind into classical monumentality. The Ergastines were the young women selected to weave the sacred robe carried in the Panathenaic procession to Athena—an honor that preserved them in stone on the Parthenon frieze. She imagines her unbidden passions in that frieze, fixed in the pediment above her bedroom wall. The dream converts private desire into public monument. Then the cat pounces and she wakes. What is divinity if it can come only in dreams, after reading a book?—the question strips the dream of its authority without resolving what replaces it. The Giacometti figures floating in the curtains, voice by voice almost alien, complete the reversal: the would-be frieze has become attenuated, uncertain, estranged. The elongated figures of Giacometti’s postwar sculptures carry their survivor anxiety into the morning window.
Section III is the poem’s theological turn, and it performs the central intellectual operation of the whole: it treats the Scientology cosmogony with the same rhetorical seriousness as Greek myth, not to validate it but to expose what myth does. Xenu invented his own birth, moved among us composing worlds, claimed allegiance to nothing—the grammar is Olympian, the content is Hubbard’s leaked OT III materials. And he moved among us, composing worlds / and the stubborn leavings of his system—the triple register of system runs simultaneously: the codified cosmology, the solar system of celestial bodies, and the digestive system, where leavings becomes excrement, the cosmology arriving finally as waste. The line does not choose between these meanings; it holds all three and lets the weight accumulate without announcement.
The body thetans antagonizing man’s vulnerable side are mapped directly onto the vultures tearing at Tityus, condemned by Zeus to eternal pecking for his assault on Leto. The parallel is structurally diagnostic rather than cheaply satirical: the punishment cosmology is the same, the self-serving narcissism of the deity is the same. The muttering king, listless in the clouds, thus filled the world with a peculiar doubt—the dismissal is in the adjectives: muttering, listless, peculiar. Zeus gets thunder; Xenu gets doubt. The subtitle’s mention of Alexis—Hubbard’s daughter by Sara Northrup, kidnapped as an infant, terrorized with a fabricated dismemberment, later denied paternity by a letter signed in J. Edgar Hoover’s name—sits inside the poem as the human cost beneath the cosmic comedy. The tyrant god who desires only himself leaves specific wreckage.
Section IV returns to the body and the bed. She reports contentment when the Bombay cat returns from the rug, bounding back. She floats on her noontide raft, navigates the emptiness above—the splintered beams framing the question where, then, is paradise? The answer the poem has been building is: here, and not quite. She covers her eyes against the ancient catastrophe, against the slow chorus of years shuffling toward her. The sunlight has disappeared; she sinks further into the waterbed as it undulates on suspended dreams. The bed is literal and cosmological both—a surface that moves without going anywhere, that holds without holding, that suspends without resolving. Suspended dreams closes the circuit opened by obverse world in Section I: the mind that projects myth onto both curtain and cosmos returns, finally, to the medium it never fully left. Stevens’s woman achieves a kind of passionate secular acceptance; this woman sinks back into the bed, the Monday implied in the sinking—tomorrow, again.
Possibilities
The Euripides epigraph—never say that marriage has more of joy than pain—is not an argument the poem will make but a permission it has already been granted. What follows is a five-part anatomy of marital dissolution, each section occupying a different vantage point on the same structure of collapse. The title is sardonic: possibilities here branch rather than promise—the several ways the same wreckage can be viewed, each angle revealing something the others conceal.
Section I establishes the governing conceit with unusual directness. A poem needs rooms, it needs the conceit of a history—the poem announces its own method, then immediately performs it: seal the history in an envelope, slide it under a door, furnish the room, install the woman. The speaker is architect and God simultaneously, assembling the conditions under which an estranged wife will come to her conclusions. The objects provided—fireplace, lamp, telephone, moon, photographs—are the props of a stage set designed to produce a specific emotional reaction. The telephone rings after midnight. She answers, studies the pictures, comes to a conclusion. Her left ear is warm. She is listening. The flatness of these sentences is the point: stripped of ornament, they report the body receiving information the mind has not yet processed. The final couplet springs the trap: every picture is a discrete moment / which has indiscreetly lost its moment. The pun on discrete/indiscreet performs what it describes—the fixed image misbehaving, the contained moment leaking, the photograph that was meant to preserve betraying instead.
Section II drops the meta-theatrical frame and enters domestic time directly. The day passes, light slants through blinds, the sun tangents the tree-tips, black cats retreat under the bed when the airplane’s rumble moves through the sky and tapers out with the last light. Dogs bark at something indiscernible. The television casts cobalt shadows. The title—Twilight of the Idols—positions these domestic objects as the ruins of a belief system, the household gods losing their charge. Nothing breaks or is named, but the catalog of sensory recession—sound, light, warmth withdrawing in sequence—enacts the emotional temperature of a marriage in which presence has become proximity. The final two lines break the third-person distance of the preceding sections and arrive in the body: I pull you toward me to kiss your neck, / your cold back pressing against my stomach. The cold back registers vacancy rather than hostility—the body present, the self elsewhere.
Section III shifts into the husband’s lucid surrealism. The moon crystallized to sugar overnight; ants on its surface appear larger than sunspots; the morning is shaping strangely. The paper is late, the cat menaces a bag in the corner, and a meter maid outside writes tickets without pausing her scooter—like Lao Tzu scribbling the Tao Te Ching on horseback. The simile converts bureaucratic indifference into involuntary wisdom, the sage who cannot stop composing even in motion. Then the pivot that contains the section’s real disclosure: the furniture was gone, the house empty, save for a small radio on the floor, Patsy Cline’s sweet tremolo drifting from the living room into the kitchen. The surreal inventory of morning strangeness has been preparation for this—an emptied house, which may be literal or may be the husband’s interior recognizing what has already happened before he has consciously registered it, Patsy Cline’s tremolo filling the vacant rooms, the last occupant of a space that has been otherwise evacuated.
Section IV, Night Doctrine, reintroduces the telephone—now silent rather than ringing, its silence as charged as the ring was in Section I. The phone has become a mouth that produces nothing, a patient sin kept vigil over by the table it sits on. The copper bone carries no pulse; the hungry ghost sends no summons. These are not metaphors of grief but of negation—the infrastructure of connection rendered anatomical and then dead, the wire gone slack, the shadow learning to counterfeit the skin it no longer touches. The body pacing circuits of its own has internalized the absence so completely it has begun to generate its own closed loops, a system that no longer requires the other person to run.
The sonnet’s sestet drives into something colder. The pronoun they arrives without antecedent and is never supplied one—the living who practice erasure, the forces that shrink a relationship into someone else’s small affair, the agencies that operate on warmth the way salt operates on a wound and cautery operates on tissue: not to heal but to seal off. The craft the living know is the craft of reduction, of making the map of another person’s significance collapse street by street through winter dark until what remains is the person who was left, still at the phone, still waiting. The dashes are not decoration—they are the mechanism of that collapse, each one a street going dark, the sentence unable to close because the waiting has not closed. The final line arrives in the present tense not as resolution but as condition.
Section V answers Section IV not with consolation but with alienation in the technical sense—Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the device that breaks identification and forces the audience into critical distance from what they are watching. The phone rings upstairs; the speaker answers it only in the mind; the future ghost on the line directs attention to the window blind, where a tattered will has been lodged in the splintered pane—a checklist for the hopeful suicide to consult before the leap. The Brechtian frame is not ironic decoration but a structural claim: that the suicidal ideation here is being staged, observed from outside itself, submitted to the same detached procedural gaze that Brecht turned on political theater. The poem steps out of its own despair and watches it perform. The checklist, the cursory glance, the nudge from the edge of sleep—despair rendered as stage direction, crisis as protocol. And then the couplet completes the alienation effect with the flattest possible voice: Feed the cat. Return your physician’s call. / Make sure you clear the hedges when you fall. The domestic imperative and the medical imperative and the practical advice about clearing the hedges on the way down occupy the same grammatical register, the same affectless tone, as if the fall is simply an item on a list that also includes the cat’s dinner—dark humor deployed as the most accurate available description of what despair actually feels like from the inside rather than as relief: administrative, procedural, oddly reasonable. The hedges must be cleared. The cat must be fed. The physician has called and should be called back. And somewhere in that list, almost as an afterthought, is the leap itself. Section IV leaves someone waiting by a silent phone. Section V leaves someone who has converted that waiting into a to-do list and cannot locate, in the list, any reason to stop.
Across all five sections the telephone recurs as the poem’s central object—ringing, silent, answered only in the mind, finally replaced by the physician’s call that should be returned. It is the instrument through which connection is supposed to travel and through which, in each case, nothing arrives or everything arrives too late. The cat appears in three sections without accumulating symbol—it is simply present, domestic, indifferent, surviving. The poem’s geometry is not circular but spiraling: each section returns to the same marriage from a position slightly further from the center, until Section V, which has arrived at the outside edge and is looking down.
For the Love of Three Cherries
The double epigraph is a duel conducted in attribution lines. Prokofiev dismisses The Firebird—Stravinsky’s making—for its musiclessness; Stravinsky dismisses Prokofiev’s ballets as wasted time. Both composers on record being wrong about each other, both confident, both caught by posterity in the act of competitive diminishment. The poem opens under this sign: the arbitrariness of aesthetic judgment, the comedy of authority applied to objects that refuse to cooperate.
The title substitutes cherries for the oranges of Prokofiev’s own opera The Love for Three Oranges—the work named after an Italian commedia dell’arte fairy tale, the work Stravinsky presumably considered among the ballets being wasted on. The substitution carries its own argument: cherries arrive smaller, domestic, vitaminic—the fruit of the absurd constraint rather than the fruit of the operatic quest. The poem has already performed its argument before the first line.
The first quatrain establishes the speaker’s posture with clinical precision. The prompt was placed beside the journal—by the wife, randomly, a domestic interruption rather than an artistic summons. The speaker noted it, set it down, applied no pressure. No inward voice. The poem is being written by someone who is not writing a poem: who has registered the constraint, declined to be moved by it, and is reporting this non-event with the same scrupulous attention a naturalist might give to an absence of weather. The second quatrain extends the indifference from cherries to prompts—both sit requiring nothing of the will, both present as fact rather than address. The poem’s subject has declared himself unaddressable, and the poem is the proof.
Stravinsky enters the third quatrain as authority for the very constraint the poem has been refusing. Constraints set us free; they serve precision and nothing else. The invocation is not reverent—it arrives as but then, the conjunction of deflation. Stravinsky, who said this, never had to answer to the plea of three fixed cherries. The theoretical freedom that constraint offers and the actual experience of sitting beside an arbitrary object and feeling nothing occupy different territory entirely. Stravinsky’s Petrushka, however, gets a partial concession—the chorded air of that score worked a spell the composer himself admitted. Even the theorist of impersonal precision had his susceptibilities. The admission humanizes the argument without resolving it.
The couplet does not resolve it either. By morning, three orange vitamins were there. The cherries have become vitamins—the fruit of obligation, the cherry-colored supplement that performs the biological function of fruit without the fruit’s occasion for myth or longing or opera. The substitution is the poem’s final move: not synchronicity, not magic, not the Prokofievian quest for the three oranges fulfilled in some domestic key, but the practical analog. The vitamins were there. The prompt was there. The poem was written. None of these events required the will; all of them happened anyway. Stravinsky’s constraint-as-liberation and the actual constraint of the cherry-prompt have produced the same result by different and equally unheroic routes. The poem ends with the composer’s argument neither confirmed nor refuted but quietly composted into the ordinary morning.
A Walk at Kobe Terrace
The Augustine epigraph—I flung myself under a fig tree and gave free course to my tears—positions the garden as a site of conversion, the moment before Tolle, lege, the moment the will breaks and the new life begins. Augustine’s fig tree is not pastoral; it is the threshold between the self that argues and the self that submits. The poem inherits this charge and distributes it across three civilizations before arriving in the present tense.
The opening line announces its method as thesis stated plainly before the evidence arrives: garden walks are fraught with implications. What follows is a compressed history of gardens as the locations where private gesture generates public consequence. The kiss in Gethsemane’s shaded slopes is the most loaded example—not the crucifixion itself but the betrayal that triggered it, Judas’s identification of Christ by the intimacy of a greeting, the private act of touching a face that set in motion wars and coronations, the trading of blades for priestly robes across two thousand years of Christian history. The garden at Gethsemane is where the political and the sacred first became inseparable, where one man’s cheek received the pressure that fractured the world.
The Athenian trellis brings the peripatetic tradition—Aristotle’s lads pressing close to catch the Master’s quips like drops of wine. The simile is precise: wine drops, not rain drops, meaning the words are intoxicating, rationed, coveted, and received by bodies leaning in. The Lyceum’s philosophy was embodied, conducted in motion and proximity, knowledge passing through proximity as much as argument. The Babylonian kings reading battle scripts in tangled vines complete the triad: the garden as oracle, vegetation as text, the arboreal cover under which power is planned and futures calculated. Faith, reason, empire—each with its garden, each with its intimate transaction beneath the boughs.
The volta arrives at tonight we graft ourselves to them, and the grafting metaphor is botanical and deliberate. The lovers are not merely entering a tradition but splicing into its living tissue, taking their cellular identity from the rootstock of martyrs, kings, and Aristotle’s brow. The furtive touches become covenants—the word carrying its full legal and theological weight, a binding agreement made without witnesses, ratified by the body. The interlacing boughs overhead mirror the interlacing of private history with public inheritance.
The couplet performs the poem’s central argument in two lines. Let reason wait—desire will speak like this: / the breath before the dialectic and a kiss. The dialectic is Aristotle’s method, the rational procedure by which oppositions are worked toward resolution. The breath before it is the moment that precedes method—the bodily readiness, the suspended instant when the argument has not yet begun because something else is happening first. The kiss does not replace the dialectic; it precedes it, and the poem proposes that this precedence is the actual origin of reason rather than its failure. Augustine threw himself under the fig tree and wept before he could read. The lovers touch before they speak. The poem ends exactly where Augustine’s garden scene ends, the body having arrived there first: at the threshold, breath held, before the turning.
September Villanelle
The villanelle tends toward incantation, toward the nursery rhyme’s circular comfort, and poets who use it seriously spend their energy fighting that pull—roughening the refrains, breaking the meter, introducing enough friction to keep the repetition from becoming lullaby. This poem moves in the opposite direction. It surrenders to the sing-song entirely, lets the form be what it wants to be, and discovers in that surrender a different kind of pressure entirely.
On the edge of a hill, on a warm day—this is the opening line of a fairy tale, the kind that begins with a king and a kingdom and a warm afternoon before anything goes wrong. The meter is easy, the image pastoral, the occasion romantic. What follows is not a fairy tale but a marriage: the wedding that came and went, the long bed, the September of new friends then lovers, the May when they were lost, the bitterness that moved in to replace them. And here is where the villanelle stops being merely a form and starts being a diagnosis. The refrains do not return because the poem requires them to. They return because this is what relationships do—they circle back through the same weather, the same hill, the same warm day, the same phrases worn smooth by use.
The distractions accumulate: new friends, then lovers, the social machinery of a couple trying to fill a space that is quietly emptying. The seasons turn. May takes the lovers. June takes the furniture and divides the money. But the refrain keeps coming back, the way the couple keeps coming back to the same bed, the same hill, the same words said each night through the pain like a rote incantation to the dead. The villanelle is the poem’s form because routine and the villanelle operate by identical logic—routine being the poem’s true subject: not dramatic rupture but the inexorable return, the next iteration already implicit in the current one, the wheel turning not because anyone is pushing it but because that is what wheels do.
The fifth stanza names the mechanism directly. “I love you” we said each night through the pain, / like a rote incantation to the dead. The communal we fractures in the lines that follow: there is nothing, not one thing that remains / sacred, I thought. The speaker has separated from the couple and taken private ownership of the refrain that began as her acceptance and has become his conclusion. The form keeps circling. The content has stopped believing in the circle.
This is the setup for what the closing quatrain does. The villanelle’s final move is structurally anticipated; the reader has been singing along, has learned the refrains, expects their return, expects the form to resolve into the affirmation that repetition usually delivers. We have been trained by the poem’s own music to lean into the closing lines as confirmation, the thesis restated, the song reaching its final chorus. Instead the two refrains, brought together for the first and only time, detonate against each other. On the edge of a hill, on a warm day / there is nothing, not one thing that remains. The pastoral opening and the total negation fuse in a single breath, and what was bouncy becomes a dirge, the sing-song curdling at the exact moment it should be most triumphant. The refrain we knew was coming arrives and means something the poem spent nineteen lines preparing us not to expect. The judicial tidiness of a couplet would deliver a verdict. This delivers a recognition—that the proposal and the dissolution were always the same sentence, that the yes contained the nothing, that the warm day on the hill was both the beginning and the inventory of what would not survive it. The volta is less a turn than a collapse, the bouncing form finally landing on the one note it had been circling all along.
The Ascetic
The sonnet opens on a question the speaker already knows the answer to. Why was I so compelled, that speaking those / words, I felt a shift—some tacit wheel / turning in the current of our lives? The compulsion is not mysterious; it is the oldest human mechanism—the declaration made to the wrong person at the wrong time, the words that cannot be unsaid because they were always going to be said. The tacit wheel is not fate but the speaker’s own psychology in motion, the invisible machinery of a man following a groove worn into him before he was old enough to recognize it as his own.
The disavowal arrives immediately and does not stick. I’m no mystic. Such visions do not heal. This is the speaker refusing the romance of his own action—declining to dress the compulsion in spiritual clothing—and then doing exactly that for the remainder of the poem. The self-awareness is real; the self-knowledge is incomplete. He knows he is not a mystic, without yet recognizing that the ascetic he wants to become is the same false costume in a different cut.
I’m secretly bourgeois. Do I love you?—the most compressed confession in the poem, two sentences that between them contain the whole disaster. The bourgeois admission undercuts the ascetic aspiration before it is even stated: a man with a leather journal, a domestic life, obligations, attachments, and the particular cowardice of the comfortable cannot slip the rope he is describing. But he wants to. The ledger of desire and rue is a bourgeois image—accounting, debt, the careful record of what is owed and to whom—and the ascetic fantasy is the fantasy of closing the books entirely, leaving a name, a fact, a hope, the barest possible residue of a self. The forest fire as redemption: burn it all, let the new growth come, ignore what obliteration costs the people still living in the forest when it catches.
The philosophical turn to Siddhartha and Schopenhauer is cover rather than scholarship. The speaker reaches for the tradition of renunciation to retroactively sanctify what was an act of desire, not detachment. Nihilism keeping its counsel in the dharma is the move of a man who has read enough to construct a framework around his own behavior. Desire is the root of suffering—the small / and local truth behind this mantra—the deflation in small and local is the poem’s most honest moment, the instant the speaker acknowledges that he is not diagnosing the cosmos but his own kitchen, his own damage, his own inherited pattern of burning things down and calling it enlightenment. The pandit earns his authority through what he refuses. The speaker refuses nothing; he simply borrows the pandit’s language afterward. The aspiration toward asceticism is the simulation of renunciation—the cloak of the mendicant pulled over the shoulders of a man still fully in the grip of the inclinations he is pretending to have transcended.
The couplet returns to the opening question in italics—the repetition italicized because it is now a different register, the question no longer innocent but fully loaded, the words released into a life and a relationship that bore the consequences. A current broke. Something reversed. Or ceased. Three fragments, three escalating possibilities, none of them named as the speaker’s responsibility. The passives are deliberate and damning: the current broke itself, something reversed of its own accord, or ceased. The agent is grammatically absent. The ascetic fantasy and the passive construction are the same evasion—the self that wanted to slip the rope now presenting itself as the rope that was cut by forces beyond its control. The poem ends in that abdication, neither confessing nor absolving, the wheel still turning somewhere in the current of other people’s lives.
The Empty House
The poem opens as instruction rather than confession—imperative mood, second person, the speaker addressing a “you” whose identity the poem withholds but whose condition it diagrams with clinical precision. Be as an empty house. The command is devotional in syntax, ascetic in content: a prescription for self-evacuation so thorough it requires blocking out children, lowering blinds, permitting the muted gray to settle into the shape your quiet has taken. That last phrase is the first seismic shift—quiet is not merely a state but an architecture, a mold that grief fills into a house already haunted before anyone arrives.
What the first sonnet performs is not grief but its management: pain assigned to rooms, compartmentalized, given presence without personhood—a presence you know by outline alone. The ascetic enters the equation midway as moral category rather than metaphor, a figure who has converted suppression into spiritual discipline. He divines the little he can of the house intact—the qualifier “little” is doing enormous work, a confession disguised as a statement of method. The couplet closes the argument like a door: There is no time for solace or display. / Only the discipline of turning things away. The word “display” implicates both performance and feeling; to feel is to perform, and performance is forbidden. What presents itself as stoic rigor resolves into a theology of avoidance—a man who has mistaken his own terror of collapse for spiritual refinement.
The second sonnet opens with a structural inversion that is also a thesis: The romance of leaving. The romance of staying. Two fragments, two obsessions, punctuated like separate doctrines. The corridor that follows is the same house—but now there are two bodies in it, no longer a lone ascetic moving through managed pain but figures in genuine proximity, each testing the frame, the structural metaphor doubling as psychological pressure. What is kept, what loosens, what presses for more—the triple movement runs from retention through dissolution into force, a progressive physics of grief under load.
The speaker rebuilds. He crosses the interior lightly, believing mourning has been accomplished. Your solitude thinned / to something almost bearable—that “almost” is everything, the single syllable that undoes the equilibrium the preceding lines assemble. And then: she arrived / without design. The passive construction is exact. She is not summoned, not imagined, not constructed from the architecture of discipline—she enters outside of every system the house has been built to manage. The room she occupies is a chamber neither grief nor will supplied—beyond the jurisdiction of either the emotional or the volitional. Though both had held the others just enough. That “just enough” indicts the entire first sonnet without requiring elaboration.
The final couplet transforms the diptych retroactively. Whatever emptiness promised to allay / she is the one you must never turn away. The ghost that cannot be refused is the grief the ascetic most feared—specific, embodied, irreducible to a room or a lesson or a practice. The first sonnet’s imperative becomes the second’s counter-imperative. Where the opening commanded emptiness, the close commands admission. The house that began as a prescription for evacuation ends as the site of a surrender the speaker has been building toward all along—a dialectic in which the second term does not complete the first but defeats it.
Far From the Edges of a Conceit
The poem announces its subject in the title and then spends fourteen lines refusing to be it. A conceit, in the metaphysical sense, is a violent yoking—two unlike things forced into extended correspondence, all the machinery visible. What this poem pursues is the opposite: not the ingenuity of analogy but the dissolution of the threshold that makes analogy necessary. The image removed from its source is the poem’s first condition, the thing already untethered, already traveling away from the candle toward the observer. The room unmaking space—not the room darkening but the room actively subtracting itself, spatial architecture in retreat, the solid framework becoming provisional.
The candle governs both quatrains. The light denuded strips even the word of sentiment: denuded is anatomical, clinical, the exposure of a surface that was not meant to be naked. A breath withdrawing from its place—the light is already breathing, already organic, already subject to the same threshold ambiguity the poem will push toward the human bodies in the second quatrain. Or the space around that breath pivots from object to surround: not the breath itself but the zone it inhabits, the negative space that defines the positive presence. The two figures enter the poem by holding their bodies in the mirror’s frame—they are already image, already removed from source, already the condition named in line one. Repeating some inherited degree / of mother, father—gestures without name: the inheritance is embodied but semantically empty, posture and bearing without the grammar to explain it, parents as physical grammar rather than moral lesson.
The third quatrain’s infinitives—to be inside and outside the room, / to be inside and outside our bodies—do not describe a state achieved but a threshold occupied simultaneously. The bracket condition is held at the moment before the body decides which side of the frame it inhabits, neither transcendence nor dissociation. The poem’s one flat declarative—the light does not distinguish—arrives without edge or grief, simply factual, the candle’s indifference to the ontological problems it has occasioned. Assume drops in without a subject, issuing instruction to no one and everyone: assume the eye returns to where it used to be. Before language, before inheritance, before the doubling that the mirror performs. Thought, unlit—stripped of the candle, stripped of the distinction the light maintained—divides what we are taught. The division is the condition of the unity: twoness is the prerequisite for the longing toward oneness that the final line enacts. Two bodies bending toward one thought—not arriving, not fusing, the verb kept in motion, the curve of approach sustained past the poem’s last word.
The title’s refusal is formal as well as thematic. Baroque conceit works by precision, by the elaboration of correspondence until the analogy is architecturally total. This sonnet works by permeability—the boundaries between room and body, light and breath, self and inherited gesture kept deliberately unresolved. What Cohen understood, and what this poem inherits, is that the erotic charge between two people is inseparable from the metaphysical problem of where one consciousness ends and another begins. The poem inhabits that problem rather than solving it, holds the frame open, and bends.
Surrender
The dinner table as confessional, as altar, as theater: the poem inhabits all three simultaneously and refuses to choose between them. The opening image establishes the register immediately—spilled wine spreading to the edge of the napkin over the course of dinner, time compressed into stain, the domestic and the sacrificial already bleeding into each other before the first sentence ends. The confession follows without transition: my wife has thirteen ribs—then I open / a third bottle as we compare traumas. The extra rib is biblical, anatomical, and quietly destabilizing—it names the wife as something slightly outside the normative body, as if the speaker’s marriage were built on a structural anomaly he is only now willing to disclose. The disclosure is immediate, tossed across the table with the same casualness as reaching for another bottle, the poem’s ground note established in that casualness: intimacy as competitive exposure, confession as social currency among two people with parallel wounds.
The waiter arrives as pure theatrical mechanism. The indifference of a Greek chorus—his intervention is oracular but detached, his tray an interposition that separates the two confessants briefly before they return to the ritual. His line, Our most popular sin is the soufflé, collapses the sacred and the gustatory into the same category: sin is on the menu, the restaurant is a liturgical space, and indulgence is what this establishment has perfected. The waiter is queer-coded and tonally unimpeachable—he belongs to none of the systems the two men are dismantling at the table, which is precisely what makes him a chorus, one that sees everything and narrates nothing before exiting.
The napkin’s transformation is the poem’s thermal core. My red napkin could pass / for a thin sheet of venison tartare—the wine stain has completed its arc from spillage to blood, from social accident to raw meat, and the speaker holds the cloth that implicates him. Tartare is already raw, already the thing before cooking, before the fire that would make it safe and legible. The two men are sitting inside a metaphor of consumption and sacrifice that the narrator is only half-constructing consciously: the evening is doing the work, and he is observing it do the work.
The waiter pours two flutes of Kir Royal, / palms the bill, then impatiently stacks chairs / behind us. The restaurant is being dismantled around them, the world closing—chairs stacked like evidence being cleared, the social architecture withdrawn—and still they remain, the aperture tightening to just the two men and the table. The Kir Royal is ceremony: the sweetness of cassis in champagne, a drink with a softness that sits slightly outside the masculine register, and the waiter pours it for both of them without comment.
Then the turn. You lean back from the table / as if you were Isaac baring his chest / braced for a father’s judgment. The posture is the whole poem’s argument made physical. Isaac on the altar is the body offered without choosing to be offered—the son whose worth was to be determined by the father’s willingness to bring down the knife. But the Isaac that arrives here carries additional freight: the man who has been feminized, whose own father was a presence that shaped the posture of vulnerability, who leans back in a restaurant with his chest open in the same gesture he learned when he was young enough to have it forced on him. The speaker watches this. He is not Abraham. He is the other man at the table who has just spent an evening disclosing the structural peculiarities of his own marriage while a waiter performed indifference. He is a witness to the exposure, a beneficiary of it, possibly a cause of it, and the poem ends on that held moment—the leaned-back body, the open chest, the judgment that is both the father’s and everyone’s who has ever looked at a man and decided what he is worth.
What is being surrendered is named in the title and nowhere else. The poem does not announce it. The evening has been a systematic dismantling of the private life—traumas compared, bodies described, sins catalogued—and the surrender is the recognition that the private life cannot survive being interesting. Once you bring it to the table, it becomes the evening’s entertainment. The wine stains the napkin until the napkin looks like the meat it has always been adjacent to.
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