1.
“Naked woman surrounded by police”: that’s one way
to start the poem. But would she mean anything
devoid of her context, in this case a lushly
late-August deciduous forest, some maple,
mostly oak? She carries no prop—for example,
no bike chain, which the cops could be sawing
from the tree trunk that she’s wedded to her body.
But let’s start with her pure, and untranslated,
as the famous cartoon of the door is inscrutable
until we post the word “Ladies” at a point that would be
four feet up from the ground if this door
were not drawn two inches tall—it’s us,
you see, who make-believe it corresponds
to a “true-life” human door. Does it help
if I say the naked woman is “really” my true-
life friend, she of the tangled dago surname
we don’t need to get into here? And if I say next
that she has been swimming—in Lake Tiorati—
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