Back from the heartlands! Also, another poem

As above, I'm back from Iowa (a marvelous place). In my absence, this blog has been looked at (I know, I know -- probably by accident) by one person from China. I am in hopes that this person will fall in with my singular (and much-beloved) Venezuelan.

Anyway, more from Ghent:

Some of the other clerks at the bureau

Would come to work in winter

Along the canals, their bone skates

Fleeting over the ice; I walked.

I had no use then for speed

Nor much for living, but with the dead

I always was patient.

At night I would drink with Melancthon

The reformer. Mild, absent-minded,

When he died he did not notice,

And went not to heaven or hell

But to Ghent. At the bureau

I helped him find work.

He wrote indecipherably; the demon

Adzok hired him to take notes

For a memor. (Needing cash, I had

Tried to sell Adzok my soul.

He said I should try to meet some girls).