They gave me a choice I didn't want: the fate
of a twenty-three-year-old man named
   Frank Spencer Robertson,

 My mother shrugged off life
Three thousand miles from Paris,
City of her birth. It takes

In this country we manufacture cages
We construct them just as you wish
made-to-order, a cage for each occasion

wdn't it be silly to be serious, now:
I mean, the hardheads and the eggheads

are agreed that we are an absurd

 Someday you will leave this town and not look back
but for now you keep hurtling toward
the red center, the road unfolding,

The companion Enkidu is clay. Sharp March dawn
at my study window, at my view of twenty-seven
budless lakefront elms. By May the water vanishes,

 …Then you must take up your well-shaped oar and go on,
      I said, and I admit he took it well,
      hampered as he was by my kind of sight.

It was our favorite pastime, to be sure,
those hairs waiting to be split, those pieces
that passed understanding. We thought we'd find

As in the plays, the body was decor,
Fit embellishment to a scene
Where chance's misrule seemed to have gone as planned:

 They want one of every kind and they
can't help it, it's an addiction,
the house full of novelty radios,