I was reading John Le Carré this past summer, the slender early volumes with such great momentum in which nearly everything crucial remains unsaid. There are no wasted words; you can really feel the thickness of silence in those books, the subtext. I’ve always been fascinated by tales of Cold War espionage, the hollow nickel holding microfilm, the wallpaper-pattern laced with blueprints. I won’t belabor the metaphor, but there’s no doubt a parallel between poets and spies: effective ones live invisibly on the margins and quietly alter the world. The whole idea is to get the right information to the right people. The poem began as interrogation and morphed rather quickly into a job interview, replete with awkwardness, jokes landing sideways and coded signaling. I thought the Horizon, as a shifting entity that is everywhere and nowhere, might make a good double-agent. But the espionage sort of fell away. This Horizon seemed a bit too yearning and honest, somehow. He simply wanted to get close to someone, to connect. It seems a dubious prospect, given …