Such sweet nonsense,
_ _riding the periphery. Billy
Shakespeare (at risk
of offending the court)
_ _so toyed
with cadences and speech: Act
_ _Four, Scene Four of Henry V—
see Pistol’s threat
to “firk” a French lieutenant.
To firk, to fuck, to flirt:
to rap or flick about, seeking
_ _covenant,
which implies a degree
of proximity,
_ _ though understand
comes from “nter”
not the usual “under” but between—
as when caught
_ _in a hard place,
the novelist agrees not to risk
public scrutiny,
_ _substituting F-U-G
for that most primitive
act, to which
upon meeting him at a party
the poet scoffs,
So you’re the man who can’t spell
FUCK! Such restlessness
_ _ comes from need. Such play
in desire. Flirt is a verb,
a state of being; a noun meaning
“stroke of wit”: what are we
in the end, if not
an experiment_—_a man
_ _who stands, framing the doorway,
mid-attempt to nail
his best friend’s wife? He is
_ _dumbstruck
by her pupils, nipples, hips, but
in the smoke-filled margin
of that NY apartment
_ _pretends to listen as she speaks,
nodding yes, no, yes, yes—
notice his half-ambiguous
_ _ quick-step, her intermittent
dash…in what’s unsaid
between them, the talking,
_ _ and the talking back.

Shara Lessley is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Her awards include the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, the 2006 Discovery/_The Nation _prize, and the 2007 Moondancer Fellowship from The Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow. Shara’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, The Southeast Review, The Nation, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. (updated 8/2007)