Reading Yeats on Blake, and Blake on Milton, and Elliot on Blake, and Milton on divorce, and Mlinko on Koethe, and Heaney on Yeats, and Hofmann on Murray, Solie, Seidel, Lowell, Bishop, Schuyler, Goethe, Heine - Hofmann on a shopping list, an obituary of a tepid life lived in the interregnum, on anything that causes his pen to scrawl on paper.

The phenomenology of a sigh. The epistemology of a claimed infidelity. The futility of a clasp on this living hand, now earnestly grasping. The causal vector of a distracted driver. The slow spreading of a spilled secret across the dead leaves by which this enlivening conversation occurs. Where Have You Been?