'A slight'


sounded.


Reverberating--in what box?--or reiterated
--like a booster shot. like the roosters in Bishop--
   sustained


(this illustrated by my tilting half a glass of orange juice
up over an empty glass--"I'm a little teapot . . . ";
more precisely: The Mystery Spot, "Cannons ready!" 
   horizon to the rim, the extreme verge.
surface tension [J. knew a word for it]--pouring
[not spilling, by virtue of the empty glass, not threatened]
suspended), suspended.


One survived--a part of her part of a part of the story
replaying in excerpts in the Holocaust Museum--the forced, 
   then called a Death,
March through the dead of winter among thousands,
   among hundreds, by spring, tens
of three young women struggling abreast, arms linked 
   so that in turn,
the one in the middle could sleep. 'The whole for a part'


then 'a part for the whole,' her visage. a certain Slant of,
quote, what a bell
meant the sound of [J. would know the word]--
   'synecdoche'), so one of us could sleep.


Heard (as thought)
but also spelled (?!): 'a slight'


--not yet an insult, minor, a slip of a

From The Seventy Prepositions by Carol Snow. Copyright © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press. All rights reserved.