Soft Spots

They’re worse than weak links in chains, which we can blame on blacksmiths’ fire, and chinks in armor, made by rain of arrows. Soft spots, those parts of us that bruise, prove we’re fruit that rots as hourglasses ooze. But I’ve a soft spot for, a phrase we tend to whisper, is what we say before we name our guilty pleasure— the damper pedal that pounds sonatas into mush the critic Ezra Pound would call, with a shudder, slush.