Bubbles have been in this catalog before. “After an Excellent Workout / Uncorked Champagne” ran the same motif through champagne and soap and dreams, and “A Repository for a Stray Thought” asked the question outright: why are there bubbles? This poem answers by locating them somewhere the earlier ones would not go — a toilet at three in the morning — and the willingness to start there is what gives the piece its nerve.

The opening moves fast and refuses to explain itself. Venus arrives as eyelashes, blue, winking, and the poem never clarifies whether we are looking at a planet, a goddess, a woman, or light on water. That refusal is deliberate. By the time the reader reaches “Venus speeding up in the car behind / on top of my bumper,” the figure has become all four at once and the joke is complete: the goddess of love tailgating him on the expressway.

The middle section stacks its allusions and then undercuts every one. Rick’s Café weaves her into view, Paris is invoked, Joni supplies the line about love’s illusions, and the poem responds to all of that romance with “just the toilet whirlpool / of hypnotic dream.” Then, in the flattest voice available: “Oh my god / Have the whole area / Scrubbed.” The bathos is intentional and the poem says so. “I’ll be bathetically logical / when the alarm sounds” is a rare instance of a poet naming his own device mid-poem, and it works because the naming is rueful rather than clever.

Chicago is what keeps the piece grounded. The Dan Ryan and Hubbard’s Cave are not decorative geography; they are the specific hell that waits on the other side of a sleepless night, and dropping real road names into a poem about a Roman goddess is the sharpest tonal decision here. The commute is described with more physical accuracy than the vision was.

Then the recovery. The bolded stanza is the poem’s thesis and the only passage set in bold: myth over logic, “just a simple pop / of awareness.” What follows is the best writing in the piece, a long descending line broken into single words — live / this / simple / life / one pop at a time — followed by three words that carry more than they should. “And still alive.”

The closing invention justifies everything. “Only you can foam(ent) / this dream of bubbles’ delight” fuses foam and foment inside one word, so that she is simultaneously the thing that bubbles and the thing that stirs up trouble. It is the most concentrated wordplay in the catalog since the Möbius strip in the champagne poem, and unlike most puns it earns its place by summarizing the argument.

Ambitious and largely successful. The poem’s method is collision: goddess against plumbing, Casablanca against the Dan Ryan, enchantment against an alarm clock. Where the collisions land, they land hard, and the Chicago section is the most physically convincing writing in his recent work. “Morning headlights popping my eyes awake” carries the bubble motif into the commute without announcing that it’s doing so.

“Foam(ent)” is the standout. Parenthetical wordplay usually reads as a poet showing his work, but here the fused word does real semantic labor and arrives at exactly the right moment.

The cost of the method is coherence. The poem changes location four times and register at least five, and the transitions are abrupt by design, which means a reader can lose the thread between the Joni line and the scrubbing joke. The Chicken Soup stanza is the weakest link, gesturing at a self-help title without deciding what to do with it, and cutting it would tighten the descent into the closing section. The three separate returns to “3 a.m.” are one more than the structure needs.

The crude line near the end will divide readers the same way the concrete stanza in “I’m too old” does. Here it has better justification, because the poem has been honest about the toilet from its second stanza and pretending otherwise at the close would be a retreat.