Foreword

in whatever spring California could muster.

A little rain—with some more likely.

And the buckeyes were they yet on the ground?

Damn my father’s smooth stone eyes,

other prevailing enticements and what Eliot called

the female stench. Damn the oaks,

their histrionics, struggling in the fog.

Spiderwebs lay in the grass, misted

and looking like misspent galaxies.

I cry into and out of this moment.

Pound told Eliot: strike this and this.

What was weak got dropped, and the poem

stood stronger without it.