What vague dispassion or crisis of hope
entered the artist's head when, leaving off
his study of a woman, he began,

His slender Moselles would, in truth, describe
the scumbled shapes of autumn, color leached
as from a cheek, sallow, opaque; or five

No single excess, nothing jerrybuilt
or squandered in a fit of thriftlessness
accounts for what we've ended with. Despite