But both primed.

        And the poet, with quiet exhalation

        protests “here and there against
        some measures.”
        Within the width of a page and the span

        of a pipe.

        Against structure,
        language “with the mechanism of
        the larynx.”

        His humility, his
        grace, his quivering hand
        quiets my resistance.

        As I listen.

        As irony reverberates 
        in space.
        Traced semes of glimmering truth
        amidst the “inky center.