Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Alfred Corn read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
.

Roving packs you eel your way
through pay no mind to what must, if they see,

look like a shadow loping along alone,
now slowing, stopping for the misted warmth

etched panes suffuse in the Hound and Rose's matched
bilateral doors. Ale glow that lights up half

of the fatman's baldpate football head,
left paw cupped to his mobile ear,

the splayed right cranking up and down
as his tenor wades alive-o into the rant.

Leave him behind then for that mid-bridge figure
(my body double?), more than half involved

with swirls and frills of foiled reflections
on the black stream coursing under …

A water no less cold than cash, it will
or will not clutch him to its heaving silk.

.