You, guitar-shaped affair with tousled squalor
of chords, who keep looming brown in an empty parlor,
or snow-white against laundered expanses, or
dark—at dusk especially—in the corridor,
strum me a tune of how drapery makes its cloudy
rustle, how a flipped-up switch ravages half a body
with shadow, how a fly prowls the atlas, how in the garden
outside, the sunset echoes a steaming squadron
of which there survived only a middy blouse
in the nursery, how hidden in the satin trousers
the comb of a Turkish dog trainer, when played, elevates his poodle
beyond Kovalevska, beyond its idol
to a happy occasion: that is, to yelping forty
times at some birthday, while wet and frothy
firework stars fizz and fade in the foggy trembling
glass, and carafes on a tablecloth fein the Kremlin.