I like what Kasey is doing with his close-readings, so I'll try my own for a while, see how it works out.

A poem by Clark Coolidge, from Solution Passage, one of my three or four favorite Coolidge books:


HPL

Those streets were not his
so he kept them in the dark to himself
knowing age for a solid pent in mind
he turned out volumes of locked domed hills

Penciled purples in the daylit dreams
wore wool humid and apology bright
letters in the doorway, arabic at the edges
the colors of science turned jagged at his cease

He was not Poe, he lived on a hill
dreamed afternoon and woke to write
icecream from ivory, an undersea
crystallized Providence cats broke
out of the past and Fomalhaut speaking

Fomalhaut, as everyone with google can discover in 10 seconds, is the 17th brightest star in the sky, in Southern Pisces. The name means "mouth of the fish" in Arabic, which perhaps explains the word "arabic" in this poem. I don't know who HPL is. An astronomer at Brown University? Nocturnal writer?

Coolidgisms in the poem: "a solid pent in mind" (adjective used as noun); "locked domed hills." (accented monosyllabic sequence). "turned jagged at his cease" (adj. as noun). A peculiar way of using prepositional phrases; syntactic hiccups that can eventually be scanned without too much trouble. A peculiar, wistful tone that I cannot locate in any particular device: the some of the parts.

Discursive coherence is relatively high: all the statements seem to refer to a single individual, the HPL of the title. A few phrases are more difficult to relate to the portrait that emerges: "icecream from ivory." Are we supposed to take this phrase as direct object of the verb "write" in previous line? Generally the lines have semantic/prosodic coherence. Sound is dense; metaphors rich and suggestive. Should they be interpreted? Should we translate, for example, "the colors of science turned jagged at his cease " as "At his death, science lost one its most subtle, colorful thinkers..." I think not, since this is only one possible construal of this line.

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Update, five minutes later: I've got it: H.P. Lovecraft! He was interested in astronomy and used the Ladd observatory in Providence as a child.