Celestial Joyride

Later, spent in darkness, we memorize
Snowfall, diminishing rooftops, sclera
Of streetlamps in parallel rows, autos

With umpteen page corners triangled down:

One tattered copy of Rumi’s ghazals

Is that a log or a dog? he worries.
The poem doesn’t know yet. Guess, it insists.

Here in America, in the pretense of democracy,
No one tells a woman how to dress.

How could we each be solitary, yet
Collectively the same?

That’s where I slouched that afternoon with several books by Ezra Pound.

There was no Lady Mondegreen. The lines of an anonymous 17th-century ballad, “They hae slain the Earl of Murray, / And laid him on the green,” are misheard as “They hae slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.” Popular song lyrics are rife with such misheard phrasings (“Hold me close and tie me down, sir”), but this time the fault was my own.

an essay published in Harper’s Magazine in 1954 and named after Lady Mondegreen.

Such misheard lyrics constitute a mondegreen, the word coined by Sylvia Wrigh