The poem is “Sacrament I” by Robin Gow (Poetry, March 2020).
Excerpt, first stanza:
& all the faucets pour oil or milk.
We fill father’s bottles, the brown and green;
thick glass blood cells, a throat-slit pouring silk.
When will the baptisms make me feel clean?
When a poet tenured in creative writing at Adelphi leads with an ampersanded sentence fragment, I suspect I’m in the middle of something; at the same time it shunts me somewhere else.
I heard Robert Creeley and Gregory Corso give a reading in Chapel Hill. It felt like discovering modern poetry. Corso’s pee-stained underwear made an appearance in one of his poems, and both men pulled steadily at a jug of Gallo Hearty Burgundy sitting between them on stage. The event was outrageous and enthralling.
A similar moment was when ampersanding poetry got my attention. It screamed “modern.” I knew I was supposed to say “and” each time I passed the old abbreviated Latin copulative tiddle, but I fell into the perverse habit of saying “ampersand” instead.
I read the first line of this poem as: “ampersand all the faucets pour oil or milk.” It has a ring of its own.
Paraphrasing a famous painter: What you read is what you read. And a tenet of drawing: Read what you see, not what you think you see. The goddamned ampersand points me in the same direction: Don’t try to stretch the poem’s words and symbols beyond themselves; let them sail free of their common cargo and mapped routes.
I’ve read several rationales behind ampersanding. One that moves the needle for me urges experiencing the poem as a made object. Something you look at more than construe? A cunning box made with words? Whatever it means, this mindset comports with my attraction to free jazz, which also drives me to abstraction. I’m striving to allow the language analog of such music to infiltrate me; to collude, not collide; to grow my proprioception in poetry space.
There’s more to write myself about Robin Gow’s poem, but not now; this jot would go too long. The ampersand deflected me from my original theme: What makes poetry ‘hard’? It almost always does.
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
Handshake
This photo captures a moment when a ritual handshake marked a pause in our Civil War.
The Virginia Monument… marks the departure point of Pickett’s Charge, an ill-fated assault launched 157 years ago on July 3 on the final afternoon of that three-day battle. The monument, which depicts a mounted Robert E. Lee on a pedestal surrounded by seven Confederate soldiers, was started in 1913 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the battle… On the afternoon of that July 3,… old Northern and Southern soldiers gathered at a low stone wall called the “Bloody Angle,” where Pickett lost 3,000 men. The soldiers shook hands across the wall…
Ackerman, author of this piece, is a veteran of combat service in Iraq. His conclusion seems to me to imply a useful distinction between history and hagiography.
A Confederate monument removal process that respects graveyards and battlefields and acknowledges them as monuments to the dead to be visited by the living, is the quickest way to eradicate painful Confederate symbolism from our public spaces and reconcile the country.
(Elliot Ackerman, “The Confederate Monuments We Shouldn’t Tear Down,” NYTimes, 6-7-20)
(c) 2020 JMN