Mal so nicely illustrates the power of rhyme to weld one artifact from words: stroke/smoke, brown/farmhouse/crowding, tip/indifferent/adrift, sleep/sheep, hands/manhandle. Rhyme here too sounds lovely dissonant chords, with pairings such as kissed/disability.

“Indifferent sheep manoeuvre,/crowding out your sky” is fabulous. “Sheep” suggest aimless clouds, but then “manoeuvre” hints at battle strategems, an assault. The sheep then double into obscurities to consciousness, as the sky is denominated “your sky” rather “the”.

Every word counts as we become more distanced from thought and life, “adrift/at the field’s edge, floating/on the dead raft/of your limbs.” Another fine choice is “fingers/scavenging for a heartbeat”.

I also loved the assured use of monosyllables to pierce the cognitive fog: “[t]he sun nails light/into your one good eye” and “she calls you from the house,/the sound of your name/curling out of the past”.

Dick’s reading itself is, of course, also a marvel. “Changed” is elongated just enough to suggest transformation. The wonderful internal rhymes satisfy simply as the right words, nary a hint of See Saw Margery Dawism. Loved the slight umbrage registered with “crowding out your sky”! Immensely satisfying, soup to nuts.