[Carl Copeland]

For me, this is a dazzling example of how seductive meter and rhyme can be. Before I even know what’s going on, you’ve already jazzed me with passages like:

the haunting queerness of not-here-ness.

But you’ve always thrived on absence, fearless.
We’ve always found in distance, nearness.

Later: sloughing—trying. Pure jazz.

And how cool is that rhyme scheme? Triple rhymes, one line out of synch with the tercets.

There are places I’d like to regularize. For example, I’d replace “with” in S2L2 with a comma and lose “by” in S3L1. But that’s my chanting habit. Not your problem.

On the whole, I get the gist, and where I don’t, the music keeps me grooving. I was going to say I didn’t mind not getting the last three tercets, but after a couple shots of vodka this evening, even they made sense. I wish I had friends as understanding as this portraitist. My tendency to be “here-and-lost, now-and-gone” has lost me more than one friend.

I have a special file of “musical” poems from the Sphere, and this one is going in. Too cool, Nemo.