I’ve read and listened to Edith Sitwell’s darkly musical poem “Still Falls the Rain,” guided there by poet Charles Behlen. It spurred a flurry of reference tracing; soars over broad reaches of scripture and fable in a short space; has structures to ponder.

Christ that each day, each night, nails there have mercy on us… The light that died the last faint spark in the self-murdered heart… Dark-smirched with pain as Caesar’s laurel crown…

Poetry! Speech that’s shivery, oblique, steep, loosed from the modulation of transition markers and clarifying relators. Where’s not to be staggered?

I feel like I approach a poem as I would a Formula One race car sitting on the track. I don’t have the road sensitivity and reflexes of a Hamilton or Verstappen that would let me know firsthand the G-force of hairpin curves rounded at irrational speeds, and the blurred scream down straightaways. I please myself instead with gaping at its innards and fingering its surfaces, busily inquisitive over details of design and fabrication that make the beast corner so sweetly.

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