August for the dozens left to bleed. When it is finished, when his captors unfurl his towel and wave it above his death, he will join those dead as they rise from their scarlet shadows toward a dream he sent his women to: Where the broken bodies of mother and wife will mend themselves and drift in clouds, whispering their love for him, their fingers longing to soothe his brow still barbed in pain. The chapel doors are chained and the parents cannot get at the poet to stop him from reading to their daughters who have rented him for the afternoon. One woman swears she saw him carrying a suitcase crammed with poems, some sticking out of the corners like underwear. The parents have rimmed the building and pound it with their fists, growing louder by the hour; and now the stained glass windows are crashing open with borrowed books and shoes; but the poet will not stop reading. The coeds climb one another to shield the poet who wants to read his whole valise of poems. Parents have reached the ledges and are poking at their daughters who moan in unison, straining to hear the poet. He goes on for still another hour and stops. He packs his poems and puts on his hat; he steps to the nearest window where a girl smiles and opens her legs for him; he wraps his arms around his poems and crawls through her before dropping to the lawn where he