Yesterday, I read a great poem about clams, although evidently, it turned out more to be instructions for cooking them – Linguini with clams, not living with clams like I thought – even though, I want to know, how. I mistake everything for what I want it to be: recipes for poems, poems for instruction manuals, classrooms for cathedrals. Once, even, I saw a man but he turned out to be just a clam. Eventually, all the poems end up sounding alike: written in that same short language of longing. Steep burden, how my heart puns about.