before, some speak of things we know as new;
and you, of things unknown as things forgot,
the calligraphic coral of fruit dyed
inside as by infusion of the rind,
or the couplet, say, that chanced to be prose,
compromises a natural signature—
a mathematician’s parenthesis,
or is it a phase of the autograph?
There is a dedication qualitied
indeed; at the opposite pole from the miser’s
escutcheon, three vises hard-screwed—
intruding on the accident of pleasure,
known if at all to sensibility
which would not for the world intrude.