“Your poems, though—well, I mean, not yours but these—they’re much better than other machined works I’ve seen,” I said.

“Sure, I’m a computer scientist,” Dr. Gil said. “Mine was an amazing program.”

Raf would talk with me or go dancing in the evenings, but dawns, before I awoke, he’d be off running through the Fifth Ward.

From my borrowed office, over the phone I told him, “The cicadas sound more Cuban for some reason. Now I’ve got Cuban ‘Bug-bug-bug.’ ”

My thoughts on him were like thin clear fish swirling through oil; they were polluted, slippery, transfixing.

“For tomorrow, I’d like you to choose one small thing to talk about that deals with prosody,” I said. “And I want you to write a canzone. Seventeen lines with the syllables occurring in six stanzas and repeated in the same order. They’re from French troubadours. Or you could try a provençal. They’re unrhymed, and in praise of love or beauty.”

I liked to have Barny in during office hours to talk about quark confinement.

“Tell me the flavors again,” I said.

“ ‘Up’ and ‘Down’ ” Barny said, “were two of the first. And ‘Strange.’ Then ‘Charm,’ and next came ‘Beautiful.’ Last one was ‘True.’ ”

I read aloud to the class a homework poem by Dr. Mali. I said, “Huh. Notice the one foot that isn’t metrical. That’s a terminal trochee. It calls attention to itself, so it’s typically used for satire. Although not here.”

During a meeting with Dr. Gil, I said, “Well, Dr. Gil. I think—don’t you?—enough of your machine’s poems. You fed it some Wallace Stevens, didn’t you.”

“Among others,” he said.

There was a cicada corpse on my desk.

Across from me, Dr. Gil had the big chair with the revolving anatomy. Anyone who sat in this chair spun musingly left and right.

“Interestingly,” he said, “that particular poem will be published in the Little Summer magazine. The editor over there, Debbie, tells me she finds it free of debris.”

“That’s because Debbie mostly sees poems about kittens or sunrises or sometimes there’s a poem on how energetic the poet’s grandparent is.”

“Those’re all good things,” said Dr. Gil.

“Inarguably. But topics that have been addressed, you see.”

“My grandmother is a hundred and eight years old,” he said. “She deserves a poem.”

“She deserves a great poem, by you.”

“O.K., O.K.,” Dr. Gil said. “If I’m permitted to write about Grandmother, to blazes with the computer. May I tell you a little about her life in the West Virginia Gorge?”

“Rhyme and meter are lulling, anesthetizing,” I said to the class. “Their uses, for hypnotic effect, are antediluvian.”

Barny said, “Well hell, professor.”

“Paige.”