You may think
that the poet—
stuck as he is
with the rest of us
in the dark rough
and curtain-thick folds
of this rhetoric—
is about
to make
his excellent point;
but did you notice
how this sentence—
now scored
with myriad nearly
invisible rips,
now asway
with its slow-mounting
stacks of peaked apexes—
has gradually
begun to slip,
like brass handcuffs
off the slick
and duplicitously
bent-back
wrists of
the magician?
