The poems in this thesis are intended to code, reveal and embellish. Formally and procedurally, they rely on many of the tools of allegory: duplicitous language, oblique narrative, and an emphasis on language as performance. The poems characteristic gestures are turns away from the other, demurrals or farewells, but rather than refusing interpretation, the poems embody an epistemology of uncertainty that suggests multiple readings. They are written with a fundamental doubt of univalent meaning, with the suspicion that our experience of the world is invariably mediated, that language and the reality it constructs are themselves allegorical, and that stories may therefore be more truthful when less direct.