The narrator's account of Almeda's dreamlike experience in which she witnesses a violent sexual encounter involving a Pearl Street couple outside her bedroom window is the climax of "Meneseteung." Awakened by the "fracas," she goes to the window and immediately sees "Pegasus . . . straight ahead, over the swamp." Below, "It's as if there were a ball of fire rolling up Pearl Street, shooting off sparks—only the fire is noise." What she hears pouring from the man's and woman's mouths are the voices of the swamp: "a rising and falling howling cry and a steady throbbing, lowpitched stream of abuse that contains all those words which Almeda associates with danger and depravity and foul smells and disgusting sights." She hears all the words she has never used in her verse, the anti-poetry buried within her polished and civilized confections, a "gagging, vomiting, grunting, pounding. Then a long...