my neighbors 
say, when what they mean 

What makes Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
so hard to put down is his wild branching rhetoric.
It’s not enough to trace pathologies of mind, whatever

Such pleasure one needs to make for oneself—.
She has snipped the paltry forsythia
to force the bloom, has cut each stem on the

Not smoke but the shades of smoke, and not cloud-work
but the gray and smoke-green densities of clouds—
if he were sure their voices would carry through