poets lie, she said

it's what they do, like dogs

bark or run around, or tvs

make that little noise, not quite

like a mosquito's whine, and

not quite unlike it either

in some small fly-sized way, poets

are like mosquitoes too, how beans

resemble kidneys, kidneys nostrils,

nostrils, sometimes, a socket, where

the longest-burning bulb

in the world was unscrewed, after

it burned out, after two hundred years