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All life's rancor served at a sail's pace on a following sea,
the lockstep march to laughter caught in each velvet fold.
Anonymously behind the back of "Otto Evermore",
a new outburst left him weak, his moods in a state of refusal
larger than a Polish root.  This false path led to the reader.
At Whitsuntide among snows they found him relaxed
and amusing, nicely ensconced at the Hotel Sacher.
The rain-framed view wouldn't budge, swollen in a socket
of hilarious foreboding, alert to the sense that he was about
to begin a glossy, sociable, sophisticated period in his life.
He buys hundreds of suits and is taken ill with themes
of birth and death, a "paradigm" of sexual dismay.
Men with packing cases milled around his boring origin.
Living just slightly to one side of his time's stampede
to the library shelves, sequestered in a lovely pension,
he writes: "These rooms make up a life untold.
From the east window I can see just where Otto fell."