So I was sitting in the bathtub
reading Eichmann in Jerusalem.
The water was cold compared with the day
but that’s a minor prune-up compared with
what unwrinkles, in memory,
“fresh as paint,” so that, say, tears
would have been a big relief even if
they had squeezed out cold, too.
But as David L. would point out I have betrayed
what I set out to emulate, which comes
of eating too many of those crackers, orange,
alluding to fish. When Alice M.
left a message I was long gone
down Whitney Ave. for another sobering tour
of the 25-ft. squid in the Peabody Museum,
amid cunningly arranged bones that make
enormous monsters for schoolchildren to name,
in Latin. Everything had been dragged out
from stacked layers beneath the sea
which is not, after all, forgiving.