Take a deep breath: there, now you’ve stooped to doing what poems tell you. It’s all downhill from here: the sordid parties, the fabulous butterflies that winter in the brain, leaving it choked with newscasters and verdigris. When you obey the poem, you always find yourself, sooner or later, in the darkest corridor of the grand hotel inside the moon, looking for either a lavatory or else the misplaced wonder of childhood. Your slippers feel rough and scaly, as if they’d been manufactured of asbestos, or sharkskin. You shuffle forward cautiously. Somewhere inside this poem Albany is lurking, and the last thing you want to do is trip over it in the dark. From the ambassador suite, the voice of the poem commands you to breathe again, and you do: left lung, right lung. Soldiers have surrounded the hotel, but that’s OK. You saw them earlier in the bar, decked out in mylar and mufti. They simply didn’t look very serious. Now, in the hallway in the dark, you hear their voices shouting, and what might be rifle fire. Breathe, whispers the poem. And you do.