quatrain

That, more than the quatrains of Omar Khayyam or the gorgeous rugs of Kerman, is the soft power that matters to Tehran.

Carla, it turns out, is more interested in “a muscular Argentine” than quatrains.

On “Throw It Away,” she distills the relationship’s collapse into an incredible little quatrain: “We reached a ceiling/I had a feeling/From the beginning/Must be the ending.”

In “America,” he added, “I had this wonderful quatrain that went: ‘I like to be in America/OK by me in America/Everything free in America/For a small fee in America.’

A sassy flute tauntingly hovers over things, and Musgraves’s first verse begins with a vicious quatrain that captures the fracture in a nutshell: