“The first time I’d heard her purring discomfited me, more, I mean, than later when I’d wake up and there she’d be at my ear. I was by myself in our little cottage…

“That process of soul-waking (as distinct from Keats’s ‘soul-making’) finds an analogy, as the monologue unfolds, in Lippi’s defense of his art—its realism (truthfulness, he’d say) as opposed to the spiritualized naturalism of…

“‘Can you see me?’ he asked before opening the book, holding it up for me to study; and sure enough, there he was amid the variously green-tinted kudzu on the cover—a ghostly headshot…

“William O. Douglas—the name, and not just the poster’s rusty red lettering, appears to have faded. He is ‘Justice Warren Douglas’ in one scholar’s reference to the poem; elsewhere, in a brief discussion…