DC PLACES ISSUE Baron Wormser   WASHINGTON Dead similes hope for a last fix—you see them In the corridors clutching their tropes and looking Around bravely: “"This bill is like Swiss cheese; It's full of holes.  This bill is like fine wine gone bad. This bill..." Language reverbs, oscillates Between manic and ludic.  Do we think in words? Or are they minions of appetite, brazening And ordaining the venal complacencies? Is there government without speechifying? You can see the phrases—diligent sprites—line up As another senator rises and starts to yawp. Lowell evoked Rome but the high-mindedness Of these propounders is American Puritan. Any rhetoric had better be a bargain.     Baron Wormser is the author of six books of poems, including Subject Matter (2003, Sarabande), Mulroney & Others (Sarabande, 2000), and The White Words (Houghton Mifflin, 1983).  He is coauthor of Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2000). His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.  He teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program and at the Frost Place in Franconia, NH, and is Poet Laureate of Maine.   Published in Volume 7, Number 3, Summer 2006.