When you are reading a poem, you may not understand it right away. There may be words or names of places and people unfamiliar to you, and sometimes a sentence may seem to go on for a very long time indeed or simply end abruptly, in a fragment. Try not to let this put you off. Use an encyclopedia or a dictionary to find the meanings of words you don’t know. Read the poem through a few times to get a feel for everything on the page. Appreciate the poem as you would a piece of music or a painting or a conversation with a friend. Try to remember that the poem does not have to mean something, but it might. One way to get a feel for poetry is by thinking about the way that words have meaning more generally. Many words have more than one meaning. The word seal can refer to the wax on a letter even as it also means large carnivorous sea mammal. Neither of these meanings does anything to restrict or disturb the other meaning. But here we are just talking about dictionary meanings. There are also meanings that are created by the way people use words. Take the word tall. We might say, “She is tall,” but we can also say, “That is a tall order.” Even words that have only one dictionary meaning may have many metaphorical meanings when we use them in daily life. Poetry is a kind of writing that generally accepts this about words. Poetry minds neither that words may mean more than one thing, nor that they sometimes mean more than one thing at once. This is what causes some people to say that they cannot understand poems.

Harry is feeling calmer now, but also more bored. He puts the book down.

He sips instant coffee from a plastic cup, prepared with water heated in a tin can. Loudermilk, meanwhile, performs his ablutions. The shower is on.

Over the sound of the water Loudermilk shouts, “I’m taking us to the mall!”

Harry says that he will see Loudermilk when Loudermilk gets back. It’s barely worth saying, and Harry doesn’t really care if Loudermilk can’t hear him. Harry picks up The Sentinel and flips past an image of a man pointing into the interior of a recently bombed shrine. He lingers on an unflattering photo of the Dixie Chicks in concert, seizes his pencil, and begins languorously redacting their sweaty, scraped-back hair and adorable faces contorted by pacifist passion, stroking the newsprint with the eraser.

Loudermilk shuts off the shower. He climbs out of the tub and displays himself naked on the floor of the living room, drying his shins with a pair of cobalt athletic shorts. “Towels,” Loudermilk says. “Make a note, please, Harrison.” He goes over one thigh. “And a telephone. So your moms doesn’t put out a fucking APB.”