Because you are the Visiting Distinguished, and because our whole city is celebrating your illustrious Treatise On Weeping, I am giving a party in your honor and discussing with you some prominent instances of weeping I myself have observed in men’s rooms, offices, train stations, etc. My other guests are waiting to join the discussion; let them wait.

It is true, it is true
Sing the whippoorwills slightly off-key
In the small city park at night.

“Nebraska and Oklahoma have the longest contiguous border
Of any two states,” you announce.
Your hair stands up in corkscrews

I stare out the plate glass window
At sky over the Boston Common
Where seagulls coast past

The face is featureless, 
As though bound in tight gauze, 
And therefore presents a mien 

This is not the Roman Campagna.
Arcadian shepherds are absent.
The myths here are Icelandic sagas

Three powerful people
seized me, held me at gunpoint,
and demanded answers. They didn’t want money.

But suppose, Irina, you find yourself asking:
What is the word for window?
And a voice, your own or someone else's, replies

Glass breaking and then laughter
under the open window—
a rabble of carousers

That far rise drifting in its first mute buds
Brightens and freezes through binoculars,
Shadeless grain of the giver. As if grown