If I don't write the introduction, then the anthology can't come out, and then the inept but well-meaning recent rhymers won't have their feelings hurt. Which would be better all around.

Tim called and said that he'd sent Killer Queen off to the publisher.

I WENT OVER to Roz's apartment with Smacko, because she was going to be taking care of him while I was in Switzerland. She was getting out of her car in the shade of a maple tree. She'd just come back from Red Leaf, a vegetable store out near Exeter. She lowered her head to the grocery bag she held and she breathed in. She said, "Don't you love the smell of brown paper bags filled with raw vegetables?"

I leaned and smelled inside the bag. "Yes, I like it very much," I said. Trying to stay on an even keel but feeling a lot of love for her and wanting to lie down on the sidewalk as a result.

She stood, smiling, waiting for me to say something more. I handed her the beads, wrapped droopily in tissue. "Just something I strung for you, don't open it now."

She thanked me, and then she tilted her face up and I kissed her quickly, pretend-perfunctorily. "Good luck in Switzerland," she said.

16

THE ADDRESS of the Tip O'Neill building is 10 Causeway Street. It may be torn down soon, because it is one of the most wonderfully unsightly buildings ever constructed. In the eighties they blew up a grand hotel that had gone seedy, and in its place they built this shrine to Congressman Tip O'Neill. It houses all the federal offices-the office of Social Security, and the Firearms Legitimization Bureau, the Bioshock Informant Management Corps, and the Soy Protein Tax Credit Administration, and the Federal Security Corn Slab Ektachrome Mediocrity Desk, plus another twelve important outposts of American impotence. And it has wireless Internet.

There was a guard dog inside who was leading around a man with a flat-top haircut. The man's job was to help the dog sniff out suspicious things. I sent my suitcase through the theft detector and emptied my pockets of everything, and they passed the wand over my genitalia, and then the guard said: "Pull your pants legs up, please, so I can see your socks." So I did. They were Thorlos, and they wicked away foot sweat like nobody's tomorrow. Roz gave them to me for Christmas two years ago.

There was Plexiglas an inch thick at the passport office on the second floor. A man in a neat blue State Department blazer asked me some polite questions, and then he clipped my papers together with a comically large paper clip and told me to wait till I heard my number. So I waited. An English mother and her four-year-old girl were there, and the girl had a stuffed baby tiger that, when she squeezed it, meowed. "Did you hear that animal noise?" said a woman. Another woman said: "I think it was the tiger." And the first woman nodded, reassured.

Then my number came up, and a wide man said I would get my passport at three o'clock. So I went up to the sixth floor and bought a tuna sub. The man who sold it to me leaned very close to the keys when he was ringing up my order. His seeing-eye dog sat with very good dog posture behind him on a Polartec blanket. I thanked him and thought the world was an okay place.

Then I went down to the atrium, and I sat and ate the sandwich, looking at a mural of huge blowups of Tip O'Neill smiling with presidents and senators.

After a while I called Roz and told her I was eating a very good submarine sandwich in the Tip O'Neill building and that I'd grown fond of the building and I didn't want to leave it and fly to Switzerland and give a master class on being a poet or be in a panel discussion on the meters of love, because I had nothing to tell them.

"Just tell them why you like poetry," Roz said.

"I'm not at all sure I do like poetry," I said.

"Yes, you do. I know you. You just need some sleep, that's all."

I was quiet for a moment, thinking. "Is Todd being helpful and nice?" I asked. Rather maliciously. Todd was the man whom she'd gone out with a few times. He was an ex-software person who now owned an art gallery in Exeter and wore soft expensive corduroy shirts.

"He's not particularly nice, but he is helpful," she said.

"Oh," I said.

I asked her if I should consider having an affair with a poet in Switzerland, assuming I could find a poet to have an affair with. Trying to be carelessly flirtatious, blowing it.

She sounded surprised. "Do you want to?"

"There would be pain and suffering after," I said. "Probably not. I'm just asking."

Roz hesitated. She said: "I would say-don't."

"Okay," I said. "Thanks for your advice."

"You know of course that I love you," she said.

I SHOWED the airport guards my stiff blue passport and they didn't say, Sir, this document is laughably new-this document didn't even exist a few hours ago. No, they waved me on. I popped into the airport bookstore, which was clean with blond wood going way up to the ceiling. It was the best airport bookstore I'd ever been in, and I liked it so much that I bought John Ashbery's latest book of poems, even though I don't need more books of poetry and can't afford them. Ashbery's photo was on the back, and I saw that he was looking older and even a little bit witchlike now with a downturned mouth. He was born in 1927. He has won every poetry prize known to man or beast, and he was part of that whole ultracool inhuman unreal absurdist fluorescent world of the sixties and seventies in New York. Once he'd edited an art magazine, Art News. Even his name is coolly, absurdly, missing one of its Rs.

I knew a little about that art world, or thought I did, in an odd way. One summer when I was fourteen I took care of a cat at a house owned by two gay minimalist painters, Jerry and Sandy. All their walls were flat white, and there were dozens of their paintings up, huge paintings, with silver ovals of metallic paint sprayed from a slight angle, dripping a little bit. The lonely cat roamed this white minimalist house, meowing in a whiskey voice. While she purred beside me, I sat on the minimalist black couch and read copies of Artforum and Art News from the neat pile on the coffee table. I was hoping to find paintings of naked women, and there weren't as many as you would expect in those magazines because abstraction was confoundedly in vogue. There was an article about a man who cut his palms and the bottoms of his feet with a razor and photographed them healing.

Now I associate people like John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara with this arty cool minimalist house where I catsat. And I'd never really cottoned to Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the book that won three awards and made him known throughout the free-verse universe. I'd tried to read it a few times and failed. It's arbitrary. It reads as if it's written by a cleverly programmed random-phrase generator. It doesn't sing.

But Ashbery is old now and therefore more likable. And one of his former students once told me that when Ashbery had a few drinks he got quite silly and giggly and sat on the floor. And the new book had beautiful poem titles in a special typeface, and it had a beautiful cover, and the blurbs were spare and piercing, and although the poems themselves weren't heartbreakers, the book made me think of the sound of someone closing the door of a well-cared-for pale blue Infiniti on a late-summer evening in the gravel overflow parking lot of a beach hotel that had once been painted by Gretchen Dow Simpson.

So I bought the Ashbery and the hell with it.

ROETHKE SAID that a country can really sustain only fifteen poets at a time, which is about right. These are people who are poking and prodding at the language in a very intimate way, and there's only so much of that poking at any one time that the language can endure. And yet in Switzerland there were masses of them. There were poets from Michigan, and poets from San Francisco, and from Miami, and from Iowa, and from Brooklyn, and from some place in Tennessee, and from Amherst, Massachusetts, and from Brattleboro, Vermont. And there were Canadian poets, and a beautiful woman poet from Piombino, which is a town in Italy, who wore pale green gloves. And there were poets from Trinidad, from Ruritania, Bali, Belgium, Austria, the Czech Republic, all over the place. Most of them spoke English. And they were laughing, and they had their name tags on. Everyone was furtively checking everyone's name tag, listening for a bell-tinkle of recognition. They were all being international poets in one place. The noise was incredible. Poets jabbering, poets laughing, a few poets looking hollow-eyed and glum. There was something wonderful seeing them in the room together, but also something a little perverse about it, too, like those kinds of chocolate cake that are filled with inner goops of extra chocolate, that have names like chocolate convulsion, chocolate seizure, chocolate climax. Then suddenly word flew through the room like wildfire-Paul Muldoon was there! Paul Muldoon! Paul Muldoon! He was besieged. I ran into him in the hall later near the late-registration table. There was a lithograph of an alpine scene behind his head. He said, "Why don't you send me some of your new work?" I squared my shoulders and said I would, Paul, thanks.