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"Mr. Powers" reads like a travel note turning immediately into poetic impulse, linking Washington, central California, and a remembered Catholic scene in Monterey before closing with a handwritten student signoff.

The page feels like the threshold to a cluster of poems, with the speaker announcing where he has been and how quickly the writing came once he got home. Jack at a Spanish Mass gives the piece its sly, human center, as if the real poem begins in an image that should be impossible and yet persists. The handwritten your / student / Lou ending makes the note feel addressed and personal rather than merely prefatory.

'Mr. Powers' is a prose note addressed to a mentor: just back 'from first Washington / D.C. and then alot of central California,' the writer says he 'wrote / these three poems right off' on returning. The sly human center is the assurance 'I know you can see Jack going to a / Spanish Mass in Monterey,' and the handwritten lower-right signoff 'your / student / Lou' makes the page a personal threshold to the poems that follow rather than a mere preface.